Originally Posted by
hockeypilot44
I was reading out our contract history. If ALPA has financial experts, why didn't ALPA know that a bankruptcy was coming and there was nothing we could do about it? Painful reading about taking huge pay cuts, then going bankrupt and having to negotiate more cuts. To me our financial experts should have been able to tell is that the numbers din't work and bankruptcy was inevitable. I am guessing that we as a whole acted on emotion and fear of losing the pension. This was a major failure of ALPA. This was a time where we needed true leadership to keep us from acting on emotion, and I feel ALPA failed miserably. It resulted in deeper cuts than were necessary and a new lower standard for us IMHO.
In fairness to ALPA's financial folks, it would have been difficult to determine whether managements would have pulled the bankruptcy trigger. In the case of the old Delta, some analysts at the time said they were in such bad shape that Delta was days away from liquidation. In the case of NWA, some analysts called it a contrived bankruptcy to freeze pensions and extract concessions when NWA was not even close to being insolvent.
ALPA financial folks likely had an accurate picture of each airline's financial health, but no accurate guess as to who would pull the bankruptcy trigger.
Originally Posted by
hockeypilot44
Relaxing the rj scope was another major failure during this time.
That is 100% true. Now we're relaxing top end scope.
If ALPA ultimately fails, agreeing to the slow destruction of scope language will be the reason.
Carl