No.
The history of this dates back to the beginning of aviation. E L Cord, the founder of American Airlines was first and foremost the owner of competing conglomerates.
Errett Lobban Cord - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
He, and other airline progenitors would commonly replace their pilots, getting rid of those who demanded more pay to compensate for greater risks, or experience (IE seniority). When pilots refused to fly in hazardous conditions and risk others' lives, those pilots would be fired and replaced with new, junior pilots.
Eventually the pilots followed the labor movement and unionized. In some cases they saw pay raises of 500% over time.
After deregulation there was a massive and permanent decline in revenues that airlines receive for their product. Today we are only beginning to see the stabilization of a decline which has been ongoing since 1978. Airlines have floundered in a vicious economic cycle (which appears to have always been the case to folks in our generation, but it wasn't). Pay was wildly out of step with revenues and concessionary contracts are always a hard sell.
The easy solution was a "B scale." Most everyone knows what that is, but for the uninitiated, "B Scale" was much lower pay for new hires who performed the same work, on the same airplanes. It was unfair, since those hired earlier got paid much more.
As more and more pilots who had experienced "B Scale" rose in the ranks of the airlines, they gained political power within ALPA and demanded that the unfair "B Scale" be ended. Our current generation of ALPA leadership well remembers "B Scale" and how it negatively effected their careers.
I think the first move to outsource B Scale flying was at Eastern Airlines under Babbit (but I'm not sure). Babbit is about the only former ALPA leader who has talked openly about what he considers to have been a mistake to move B Scale (small aircraft) flying off the seniority list.
By the time Charles Giambusso (former Delta MEC Chair) came along, every major airline had engaged in outsourcing small aircraft flying. US Air probably had the most, on a percentage basis, when the question of Comair came along. Small aircraft flying was seen as a problem, a stepping stone, a pariah, to mainline lists. Worse, having used outsourcing as a method to eliminate hated B Scale, small aircraft flying on the list was perceived as a
threat. Just as the B Scale pilots had wrestled control away from their oppressors, the B Scale guys feared the next generation would take control from them and lavish negotiating capital on increasing pay on smaller aircraft AT THE SENIOR PILOTS EXPENSE!
While this happened at every major airline, the effect was particularly acute at Delta, where you had excellent labor relations with management and a lot of military pilots who had done pretty well working for Delta. For the most part, the Delta pilots saw less need for the sort of "unity" used to fight management compared to pilots who had come to age in EL Cord's time. The Delta MEC and Delta pilots saw nothing to gain and much to lose by pursuing unity with pilots who performed their outsourced flying. Delta management had always been benevolent and the concepts of "unity" which were a religion to some within our union were considered something of a quaint notion at Delta, if the concept of "unity" as a way to fight management like EL Cord's was understood at all.
Today we are at a crossroads. The experienced hands say "trust us, Delta management has our best interests at heart." The junior pilots see nearly half the airline outsourced in a decade and are fearful of just the sort of alter ego replacement EL Cord (and early airline managers) did as a matter of routine.
It is my opinion airline management has not changed. Delta at one time was a very unique Company that has adapted and changed becoming like its competitors and now leading them. There is no doubt Richard Anderson has been a good steward of the corporate entity. However, any quaint notion that Delta network management approaches their job with warm and fuzzy feeling about Delta employees is ridiculous. These are numbers men and they approach your career with the certainty and coldness that are the result of purely mathematical calculation. In other words, EL Cord's sensibilities tied to a lightning fast computer and only filtered by a sense of political correctness and legal restraint.
We need a return to our roots, unity. Nothing has changed in aviation. Just as in Cord's day without unity we will be replaced by junior pilots willing to perform our work for less, willing to sacrifice working conditions and willing to sacrifice safety.
I don't see this as a matter of economics. It is a matter of
survival. Logically it follows that if ALPA fails to unify their pilots, ALPA itself will be the first to fail. By the time the DPA supporters figure out their plan is ineffective all will already be lost. The answer to preserve our union, our careers, our pay and "Delta Air Lines" as we know it is unity ... we have to get to Delta pilots performing Delta flying.