The east west bickering will go away after a merger that subordinates both groups to the back of the bus. If ALPA had not been tossed and the SLI had been implemented then everyone except a few would have gotten over their mad years ago and we would be on our second joint contract by now. I am firmly convinced of this.

R57, you ask if I feel this way because we came out so much better under the Nicolau. I ask you, who came out better? I didn't, I lost 18 percent seniority on the Nicolau. Our top guys did even worse. But as I have said, it doesn't matter what I feel about it, we were going to abide by whatever decision came out. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. We can all claim whatever we want after the fact, so, again, this is all meaningless. Did we get a windfall because we were not stapled according to date of hire? I don't think so, we kept the seats and jobs were brought to the merger until Doug took them away.

I think this will go to arbitration because that will be the only way people will be able to deflect blame onto another entity. You brought up the concept of a panel. That's a fine idea, but they should be professional arbitrators. It will be interesting to see how the UCAL SLI is done. There is a disparity in the length of service in the seniority lists from both. How an arbitrator handles that will be illuminating.

If you are talking to Hummel you better get him to start getting serious about dropping the DOH stance. The company sent a letter to the NMB stating that USAPA will not get off the DOH position and thus no negotiations can succeed since the present seniority proposal from USAPA is a DFR. The company will not move from their position until a seniority list that looks, acts and quacks like the Nicolau is used. This DOH position will get USAPA shut out from the merger process as well. I'm not saying the Nicolau list will be presented by LCC, I don't know that for certain, but the company is very aware of the legal ramifications of not using that list, or something very close to it.