Now after defending DALPA on the this very issue I will say DALPA was given a golden opportunity to do exactly what you mentioned and totally blew it, in my opinion one of DALPA's biggest failures.
Let me set the scene. We were in BK. We had over one thousand Pilots furloughed. DCI was hiring like gangbusters. We either had an 1113 hanging over our head or already agreed to LOA 46, not sure. The company reduced Green-slips to 150% pay and did not count leaves, sick leave, vacation etc toward the green slip trigger.[B] In other words we had no status-quo, the company changed our contract.
No, the company did not "change" our contract. It WAS our new contract that we the pilots voted for. It still WAS the status quo, painful as it was.
Did DALPA rise to the occasion and put out the word - "Hey, guys no extra flying with furloughs on the street." Hell No! We were given a total freebie, we had no status-quo, the exact reason we were sued a few years prior and we blew it. Guys were Green-slipping like crazy with over one thousand Delta Pilots on the street. Hiding behind some BS status-quo threat when no such status-quo existed for 150% green-slips. We totally blew it.
ALPA could NOT do that. The RLA is very specific. A union (or company for that matter) cannot authorize "self help" until very specific points in time. You MUST have been sent to a 30 day cooling-off period--from a NMB mediator--and then that must have come to its expiration. Then and only then can the union explicitly state "we are directing a withholding of service, and we are defining that as no green slips until further directed."
ANYTHING else is illegal. Sorry, that is the RLA for you. But it works both ways. I remember when Leo Mullin was CEO and he was pushing Congress for "baseball style arbitration" in the RLA and remove the ability for unions to strike. It was a blatant anti-labor move. The words had hardly left Mullin's mouth when you could hear (then ALPA president ) Duane Worth sputtering all the way from Herndon, VA. "This is anti-labor" (which was true) but even more telling, Worth reiterated over and over "the RLA has worked well for many decades, almost all contracts are resolved without labor needing to strike and/or mgmt needing to lock-out/hire replacements" etc etc and "
the RLA has served the aviation industry well for decades, and thus there is no reason to change it." (emphasis added)
So what does that mean? If we are under the umbrella of the RLA, we have to adhere to ALL the provisions of it--not just the ones that are convenient to us today. That means NO self-help, no grass-roots "hey don't fly GS this month" or "hey, lets all call in sick" (a la the APA and their sickout) unless specifically and clearly called for by your union leadership as explicitly permitted by the RLA--as excruciating as that might be at times.
By the way, that does not mean that you MUST fly O/T. I have flown 4 GS in 16+ years. I didn't even dream of flying a GS while we had guys on the street. I don't know if that really brought them back any sooner than they otherwise would have anyway, but I just couldn't look myself in the mirror and accept a premium pay trip while we had guys furloughed--just couldn't do it.
What it
does mean is that if a guy is flying as the contract allows, you can't leave nastygrams in his file, post his schedule on some bulletin board etc, just because
you don't like it. If it is truly that bad, then petition your union to change the contract. (This by the way is a whole different scenario than someone who performs struck work, which makes him a scab. But again, there should never be any doubt as to what formally defined struck work is).
Not only that, but sometime around then we agreed to allow retired Pilots, who had received their lump sums, to come back and help Delta man some of the senior positions. The company figured out we were short in some of the senior categories and came to DALPA for help. DALPA of course, obliged.
Not sure what, if anything we got for that. Maybe just the satisfaction of helping an incompetent management team get out from under one of their screw ups.
Not DALPA's finest hour.
Scoop
This is a tough one. No one--DALPA included--was happy with this program. But the bottom line is that hundreds of senior pilots all retired simultaneously to protect their lump sums. Absent the PRP (Post Retirement Pilots) program numerous widebody categories would have just shut down--no amount of GS, AEs, etc, would have helped. ALPA did a good job limiting the program to just as few pilots as possible, made all of them junior to the plug non-retired guy in every category, and put a finite timeframe on it. Again, no one liked it, but it was the "least bad" option at a really crappy time. And yes, we bailed out an imcompetent mgmt team.