Originally Posted by
Check Essential
I can't say with absolute metaphysical certainty of course because I was not in those closed sessions but it seemed pretty clear to me that 100% of the reps have been fully aware for weeks and months now that at least some version of CDOs were being discussed, and that CDOs (or at least the possibility of CDOs) were a part of the direction given to the negotiators by the MEC as a body. That fact was evident from the first day discussions. There obviously may have been reps who strongly opposed that "direction". I don't know any individual rep's position.
I also do not know to what extent the final CDO language in the TA conformed to the wishes of the MEC. But I think its very safe to say that the negotiators did not come up with the idea of CDOs on their own and then spring them on the MEC in this TA. The MEC was aware the whole time.
Who is responsible for failing to adequately communicate the possibility of CDOs to the line pilots before negotiating them into a TA? That is an open question. The MEC as a whole? The administration? The reps who favored CDOs? The reps who opposed CDOs? I don't know. I do think we need to have that discussion.
Thank you very much, CE. I think you're right about having that discussion.
I think one answer is obviously that when our reps were engaged in discussions about CDO's since October, there needed to be a discussion within each council. Ed Grimley had a good post about a protocol we should be following (with some small changes), and I strongly agree that we need to have some sort of predictable procedure, in which pilot input is validated upfront, and throughout the process.
The MEC failed to anticipate our reaction to SDP's, and they failed for the simple reason they never floated the idea to the group. It seems to me that they actually genuinely believed that these were a good solution, but that was based mostly on the input from guys begging for them. In other words, if there was a better protocol for developing smaller LOA's, that would mirror Section 6, with polling, they've totally failed to follow the most basic steps.
Informal e-mails from a few guys lobbying for specific (and obscure) items does NOT represent "input from the council".
We have to help them clean this up. The way to fix this is to get them to apply the Section 6 process to more LOA's, and get the policy manual re-written to get more automatic MEMRAT. In this case, we got to sufficient pilot input, but in an ugly, convoluted way. Although Donatelli was off on his analysis of the TA, he gave us the synopsis with just enough time to make our voices heard. At the end, the offensive section was identified and removed.
There must be a better way. You can't grossly muck up the first several steps of the process, totally fail at getting pilot input, then hide behind a vote for MEMRAT,
after a unanimous vote for the TA. It's so grotesque an argument that so far, none of the reps have tried. We know from experience that most, if not all, TA's that are endorsed by the MEC are ratified by the group. A TA endorsed universally is even more likely to pass.
Which is why we must go back to basics, and have a better feedback loop that involves pilot input by design, not by accident.