Awesome! Getting off the topic of scab but that's ok....This is far more than a black and white issue.

Well in a free market the market decides the pay, not the employer or the unions. The employer can make an offer but if it's not competitive that employer will not get the best employees accepting positions. So the natural balance is that the best and most experienced employees stay at the higher paying (with best benefits) jobs while the lower paying employers get the low experience, less qualified, less desirable, employees as well as the highest attrition (increased training costs). This is how it works with virtually any other type of job or profession in the free world and it works very well.

Clearly there are things that set the piloting profession apart from other professions but it's nothing that necessitates an entirely different way of doing things. People who are pro anything are very good at rationalizing their position and firmly believing it. We also refer to it as fanboy syndrome. Kind of like the irrational arguments that develop in discussions that may ensue in a Mac vs PC debate or even a liberal vs conservative debate.

I am not anti union. I firmly believe that unions have a place and serve a solid purpose and that ALPA and other pilots' unions have helped to further the cause of aviation safety. The problem I see is that the system has evolved to cause a negative long term effect on the profession and has allowed management to exploit the system to the detriment of most pilots while benefiting a few. The pro union mentality sort of blinds pilots to that exploitation.

I'm pro pilot and pro economic growth at the same time. Being exclusively pro union is too narrow a focus and plays into the hands of big airline management.

Not really what I see. It's more of a generational thing. Most people tend to be pro- whatever benefits themselves in the near term without looking at the larger issues. Ninety percent of pilots believe they are in the top ten percent of skill and ability so that's just the nature of us and it creates a lot of posturing. What I see is that those who do see past their own noses tend to be younger pilots but with reasonable amounts of experience.

Thanks again. So my feeling is that seniority worked very well in the old days when most pilots got on at an airline in their twenties and expected to stay there for life. Thirty to forty years ago it was widely perceived that if you didn't get on at an airline before age 30 your career was stalled and possibly over. Back then there were no massive regional airlines and the airlines we had all paid pretty well.

Deregulation changed everything and airlines started popping up like weeds and lasting only a few years while established airlines merged or went out of business. Suddenly the seniority system showed signs of problems and people talked about it. A lot of senior pilots were on the street or were concerned they were about to be. Airline management initially exploited them by encouraging them to become scabs.

It has always been a tactic of management to turn union employees against each other and they started to learn new ways to do it. They quickly realized they could reduce labor costs by outsourcing to commuter airlines which up until then were small and only employed a very small percentage of the nation's professional pilots while providing an opportunity for young civilian pilots to build experience and move on very quickly. The "code share was invented and the regional airline model exploded and fueled the demand for regional jets. Modern regional jets are highly efficient fully capable jet aircraft that can do medium haul flights with 50 to 90 passengers while operating under the same marketing and name as the major airlines.. These are not commuter flights.

Airlines built this massive industry while retaining the philosophy of it being a training ground for low time pilots who didn't need to be paid well. The time it took to build experience to move to a "major" was gradually increasing over time and the pay never went up. The pilot profession (and the unions) was the frog slowly being brought to a boil. I'd say the water is boiling now...regional pilots have spent over a decade there and some as long as ten years in the right seat earning near poverty wages.

Management may have burnt themselves now because they put too many pilots into this pool of slowly boiling water and realize that there aren't as many suckers jumping in after them. By scraping too close to the bottom of the barrel they got the attention of Congress who pushed up the hiring minimums. Their reaction is to cry to the government of a pilot shortage with a massive lobbying and PR campaign and we all know what's going on with that.

A system that used to make sense 40 years ago now seems ridiculous if you stand back and look at it objectively. The only people who can't see that are the "frogs" who are still sitting in the pot of near boiling water.

If you try to explain to people outside our business how the captain of a large jet (such as an E175 or CRJ900) is only trying to build time to be a co pilot (for less money) on the jet sitting one gate over with the same paint job they can't understand the logic. Especially when that captain has been working for 10 or 15 years. They can't understand the logic because there isn't any logic. It's even more ludicrous to think (when things are moving quickly as they are now) that a low time college graduate can become the captain of that jet in only a couple years because his captain went back to being a copilot somewhere else for a pay cut. It's an inefficient distribution of overall pilot experience.

It's also bizarre to outsiders why a captain who lives in city A and commutes to city B can't apply to switch jobs with a captain of another airline (of the same code share even) who lives in city B and commutes to city A.

The regional airline business model is a scheme that only works because of the ability of management to exploit the seniority system and prevent lateral movement of pilots. Otherwise the market value for a captain would be pretty level regardless of the size of the jet (in fact a regional jet could theoretically pay higher than a heavy jet for high time captains that prefers to be closer to home). This is how they are able to force artificially low pay scales.

By keeping a small percentage of pilots at the top they have managed to maintain the illusion of the goal that pilots aspire to. To realistically measure pilot pay you must look at the average pay of all airline pilots, not just the top pay of which most pilots will never achieve in their career.


And I won't respond to Airhoss because he's not discussing this...he's just tossing insults and ignoring what I said.