I'll play.
To summarize the legalese, ALPA mgmt believed it had bargained to impasse with another union's negotiating team that represents its 168 administrative employees. At that point, it instituted changes to the contracts and layed off 12 employees. The employees, under their CBA, through their Union, protested and the NMB agreed. ALPA must now either appeal or make things right.
First things first. All that stuff in bold above? Doesn't pertain to us at JetBlue.
Meanwhile back home, JetBlue management:
- Changed healthcare without any negotiation, voting, or even signatures on the part of individual pilots, providing the WORST health care coverage of any major airline and costing many pilots thousands to tens of thousands of dollars per year.
- Fired pilots from a 2500-strong employee pool in a process unprotected by any powers nearly as robust as the 168 employees mentioned above enjoy.
- Created its own charter for using the employee representation entity (the PVC) to "negotiate" benefits and work rules, then violated it multiple times.
- Used a Peer Set Industry Average argument to set low wages, then when the PSIA demonstrated reason to raise them, simply changed the peer set. Meanwhile, management invented a different peer set to set their own wages and benefits.
- Payed themselves industry-leading bonuses while paying their employees industry-trailing profit sharing.
I can continue.
There are no appeals.
No NMB access to file a complaint.
No legal team representing our 2,500 pilots to pursue other actions.
As a JetBlue pilot without a union, your only recourse to those management decisions are to complain, hire a lawyer at your own expense (to fight against a PSIA-leading legal team), or swallow the pill. For either option you take (even compliance), you can be put under "progressive guidance" and fired. Or you can leave.
Or, you could vote YES and start working to make things better.
Your choice.