Originally Posted by
Captain Bligh
Seems like a lot of one sided horn blowing. The CAL pilots who did fight Lorenzo, especially the full term strikers, deserve far more credit and should be held in the HIGHEST regard. To paint the CAL strike history as a failure of the membership and ring the bell for the UAL strikers who "did it better" is myopic at best. I know a few of those '85 "Be United" Strikers and to a man, they were all about 5 days from crossing. If Ferris had held out one more week we'd be talking about how the UAL scabs drove the final nail in the industry's coffin.
The "question" was rhetorical...
75 in five months vs 200 in 2 days and 300 in 29 days. Fortunately, in spite of 300 United pilots crossing, their strike succeded in 29 days. Unfortunately, in spite of all but 75 holding the line at Continental for five months, theirs failed. Flying The Line II.
"The Continental strikers had held their lines with virtually no crossovers* for nearly five months, but Lorenzo had a large contingent of “out-house scabs” nearing the end of training, and something approaching panic set in as these post-Bildiscoe [court ruling] crossovers saw their jobs disappearing forever." p 172
“Rick Dubinsky predicted that [United] would lose no more than 4 percent [200] the first 48 hours, and that prognosis was essentially correct, ” says Roger Hall . . . "After 29 days, we ended up right at 6 percent [300] who went to work..." p 207
* ("...some pilots, accustomed by now to Lorenzo's Emergency Work Rules, stayed in their cockpits. This group (about 75 pilots) would be joined by approximately 200 more crossovers in October..." p 163)