Voting for higher pay, which directly translates to higher costs as a subcontractor, only works if you can directly bring your competitors wages up as well. That is the entire premise of a union: "a union wage." As long as the various unions act in a disconnected way, and anybody who is willing to pay 2% of their paycheck can be certified as an alpa carrier, ALPA does not act like or provide any real benefits aside from perhaps legal and medical Council. The real point of the Union is to establish a baseline rate, below which if you operate at you cannot be a union member and therefore are doing union work as a scab. To see various airlines take large concessions and slit the throats of their fellow union members, is totally and entirely contradictory to the very idea of unionizing.

The name of the game in this country is capitalism and it is based on the premise that if the same work can be done for less, you hire that person. In the regional airline world of subcontracting and contracts that are unique to every different airline, for both the pilots and the contracts with mainline partners, the union model only makes sense if there is solidarity between pilot groups.

What ever the best intentions of any given pilot group are, the de facto result is good old-fashioned cutthroat capitalism, and the most heavily unionized (regional) airlines become the least flexible and eventually fade out of relevance. Comair, AWAC, eagle, horizon, etc. You don't have to like this message, but it is just the true state of the regional industry. Until there is any kind of inter-airline unity, there is no such thing as raising the bar. The nail that sticks out gets hammered, therefore all these discussions are just abstract ideas about what a regional union could be, because in practice it is nothing like that.

Without a "minimum union wage" ALPA is about as relevant as SAPA.

* DISCLAIMER: this does not apply to mainline for obvious reasons