Yes, it is a shame that times have changed. It's a shame that we don't have a labor situation tantamount to the 1950s and 60s, when one of three working men belonged to a union and most non-union shops tried to match the union scale, if they could, to keep the union out. In those days, the CEOs of major corporations earned approximately ten times more than their highest salaried worker; at one time in the 1970s I believe, the head of Delta Airlines earned slightly more than five times what his highest captain earned. But we've brought a lot of that on ourselves. It was a better time when a man named Romney ran a car company that manufactured tangible products and negotiated fair contracts with his laborers, rather than this era when his son made his fortune manipulating financial instruments and came within a whisker of the White House.

It's a shame that workers embraced Nixon's Southern Strategy, went along with the Reagan Revolution, and elected state legislators who enacted right-to-work (for less) laws, along with generous tax breaks for industries who were anxious to hire below the union scale. It's regretful that today's private-sector employees disparage teachers, cops, and firemen who have successful public-sector unions. Instead of being jealous of this last remaining vestige of successful unionism, they should try to emulate it. But, instead, they insist that if they have to take a haircut in their paycheck, so should those government employees.

You talk a lot about bygone days, of PEBs that were held on behest of nonexistent companies such as Wein. You talk of the Lorenzo, Ferris, and I think you forgot to mention Nyrop. Yes, there were some successful strikes against those bastards back then, and some that didn't work out so well. It helps if your strike lasts only 29 days, such as United's in 1985. It was not so nice if it lasted two years, such as Continental's. For better or for worse, times have changed. With airline consolidation, whether you like it or not, those days are over at American, United, and Delta.

Yes, I'm aware that a PEB has a term of only 60 days. Don't bet, even if the company and the union are intent on kamikaze tactics, that Congress will allow a strike to take place, though. Do you really think the mayors of New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, and the Congress critters who represent those districts, will let a strike impact air travel--and all of the jobs in those cities--just because a bunch of airline pilots want better pay and protection from having their jobs farmed out to commuter carriers? If you do, you're deluding yourself.

Airline pilots aren't terribly sympathetic characters when they're out on a picket line. The average Joe thinks we make twice or three times what we earn, have 20 days off a month, and a mistress in layover cities. Those big-city mayors and Congressmen, who tend to be Democrats, see little political advantage in allowing an airline strike to impact the economy of their cities--on behest of a labor group that tends to vote about 80% Republican. If you were Rahm Emanuel, who would you favor? The working-class mechanic or ticket agent who lives in your town, whose paycheck might stop if the pilots shut down United, or a bunch of GOP-voting pilots who live in the suburbs? Think about it.

You seem to long for the good old days. So do I. I liked the time when a Teamster, if he encountered a picket line on a delivery to the airport, would turn his truck around and take the load back to the warehouse. I liked the idea when American workers bought American cars from union assembly lines in Ohio and Michigan, not from non-union factories in Tennessee or Texas, or from abroad. I like the time when, if a large retailer such as Wal-Mart tried to keep a union on the property, the working class folks in town wouldn't shop there. Nowadays, Joe Unionized Pilot is unashamed to shop there.

I liked the time when pilots, mechanics, and flight attendants honored each other's picket line. Are you aware that in the current CAL contract, our vaunted 50-seat turbojet scope clause--regarded the second best in the industry after Southwest--has an anti-labor provision that prevents CAL ALPA from declaring a sympathy strike with another employee group? Look it up. (Fortunately, the United book, whose language this TA has adopted, doesn't have that clause.) But I'm not hopeful of that kind of labor solidarity ever returning, to our property or anyone else's. Not with the attitudes expressed by some of the copilots I fly with, who look down their nose and sneer at Linda Puchala because she was a flight attendant.

If you'll dig back into our historical archives, you'll realize that kind of camaraderie with other labor groups went the way of the dodo bird when United's pilots, fearing a break in their ranks, called off their 1985 strike and negotiated a back-to-work agreement that left their flight attendants--who had honored the pilots' lines--without a back-to-work agreement of their own. If you go back a little farther, you'll remember that some four years before the CAL pilots went on strike in 1983, they refused to honor the picket lines of their flight attendants. They were aghast that the FA union wanted the lead flight attendant to make as much as the second officer. How uppity of them!

This was just about the time when most pilots, being the white, middle-class, tax-averse, law-and-order Republicans that they were, decided to break ranks with other labor groups. This was just about the time when they fell head over heels in love with Mr. Reagan, and cheered when he fired those snippety air traffic controllers. How dare they engage in an illegal strike, those spoiled government workers!

And you're upset because what goes around comes around?