You very well may be right about this. While that line of thinking might smell like a "conspiracy theory" and everyone wants to run away from anything that smells like that in fear of being labeled a conspiracy theorist, there is some precedence that kind of backs it up.

We rolled, and I mean ROLLED over, on the DPJ non permitted jet scope issue. As in rolled over with ZERO resistance. They didn't even want to file a grievance, but one was actually eventually filed, but only after the peanut gallery demanded it. We won a stunning slam dunk victory, right around the time C2012 was wraping up, and rolled that relief seamlessly into the contract for no difference in any other section. Perhaps someone can cling to theoretical plausible deniability and say something like "we would have gotten 4/7/3/3 instead of 4/8/3/3 were it not for this" but no one buys that. The MEC was extremely sympathetic to the company on this issue and literally didn't even want those jobs in the first place. A blatant Section 1 violation was yielded to the company and forgiven as a gesture of constructive good will. As a additional corollary to our current JV grievance, part of the justification and management of expectations then, as now, was that "it just isn't that many jobs".


This is shaping up to play out in a similar fashion. However in this case the line swine has a little more clout over the bureaucracy because widebody international jobs are harder to sweep under the rug than large corporate jets or even large RJ's (reference the RAH certificate trickery relief that happened about the same time as the DPJ jobs give away).