Originally Posted by
ShyGuy
It wasn't management. It was your own JCBA. I was very vocal about this very topic, mainly because the loss of the XJ Saab fleet meant 9E vacancies would be filled with them, and cause some displacements of 9E pilots. I took my concern to several union reps, and all said the same thing, that with this JCBA, we force the company to have a company-wide bid, and bid whatever you want! It made zero sense. You had pilots from all 3 certificates that wanted to jump across all 3 airlines, and management was forced to allow it. What should have happened is that movement across all 3 airlines should have been on hold, and allowed only movement within each own airline, until a joined fenced operation was fully functioning. The way it happened, 9E Corp was allowing all 3 pilot groups to jump across all 3 airlines as soon as the JCBA came out, and well before any fenced operations even started. Ultimately, the Mesaba group ran the new union. They made a serious push to make sure CS would lose and TW would become the new MEC Chairman. And since Mesaba was already wearing the pants in the whole situation, they couldn't afford to have no movement across the other two airlines when their Saabs were parked. They used the provisions they put in the JCBA to force the company to allow their pilots to bid across ASAP.
So in that regards, it wasn't management that allowed that to happen, it was the union and the JCBA.
It isnt that simple as us all being greedy pilots wanting to bid whatever aircraft was available, but imagine that??? At the time, 9E and 9L were understaffed, as usual and XJ was a little fat on pilots when DL decided they were no longer interested in us operating t-props for them. By your logic, 9E and 9L would have continued to run short and XJ would have possibly had to furlough. I will grant you, they should have organized the merger in a more organized fashion, but if they were properly staffed in the first place, maybe what you suggested might have worked better.