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.
Problems started LONG before the Saabs started getting parked. Management can read (at least I assume so), so they knew what it would cost on that first vacancy. VACANCY, not displacement. We had guys sitting around going from the -200 to the -900 that just needed differences training for 3 months. By the time displacements hit, the vacancy still wasn't dealt with. If the company had offered several, smaller vacancies on a rolling schedule, they could have handled it rather than forcing a training bottleneck. The JCBA worked exactly as designed: it was there to prevent the company from dragging their feet on training events and if they did, the pilots were compensated for it. Management decided they wanted to try to get it all done at one time rather than run multiple vacancies. The displacements that were on the horizon made it worse.
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.
Let's face it. You weren't doing this out of the goodness of your heart. Let's not forget the mindset you were in during the time. "Colgan and Mesaba guys stole my upgrade" was probably the best way to put it. How long do you put it on hold? Long enough for XJ and Colgan guys to be furloughed? Someone was going to get wronged one way or the other. That's the way it goes with mergers. I had guys from Colgan jump me on the seniority list, too.
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.
IMO, CS did enough to shoot himself and the 9E MEC in the foot as it was. I don't think XJ would have had to fight too hard at all. DTW might have been the only base that wasn't ready to see a regime change.
They used the provisions they put in the JCBA to force the company to allow their pilots to bid across ASAP.
Heaven forbid the union make the company stick to an agreement....
So in that regards, it wasn't management that allowed that to happen, it was the union and the JCBA.
Management set the numbers, though.