This is where union leadership and pilots in general are sometimes too smart by half. ALPA finally gets the pilot group (and the Company reluctantly) to sign off on Agency Shop, selling it to the pilot group with the bait and switch of we will prevent any freeloaders from working at FedEx. Everybody shouts amen and votes for the contract.

But wait, since ALPA didn't have the balls to go after current non-members, they grandfathered them in. Why? Can't change the employment requirements of those 150 or so pilots. Well how come we can change the employment requirements of the other 4250 pilots? Because they WILLINGLY agreed to change their employment requirements (and gave up their ability to ever quit the union without paying a maintenance fee equal to dues) by voting for the contract with Agency Shop in it! It would be tough to say that we were forced into Agency Shop. That is why it will never change without voting in a new union.

So ALPA, thinking it had scored a major coup by capturing dues from everyone (from then forward) actually just put another wedge in the pilot group.

A couple years later they (ALPA) helps screw about 70% of the membership, and then wonder why there is no unity going forward. Meanwhile the company sits back and marvels at how devisive this clause has become and why hadn't they acquiesced to this demand in the previous contract.

The people who should be angry about Agency Shop are those who have been hired since the 2006 CBA, as they were denied their freedom to choose to be in the union or not by those who were here before them. They got the real short end of the shaft, a kind of union B scale, forced on them by those of us had already gotten ours.

This is still a free country. Union membership should be an individual's free choice, based on their values and perception of the benefits of membership. It shouldn't be a mandatory tax that you have to pay to people you may not have the slightest agreement with in terms of issues and politics in order to have a job.

I would love to see Agency Shop go away, but it won't happen with an ALPA contract.