Originally Posted by BeatNavy

That's kind of my point. If we take what they give us (and if FFD carriers take what they can get to gain contracts from daddy mainline at bottom dollar and razor thin margins), we will be around for a bit longer than if we take a unified stance against poverty for pilots (ie current regional picture across the board, even for the "good" ones) and vote down embarrassing contracts. This will accelerate the ultimate demise of the regional industry as it is today (which is overdue IMO as mainline is out of bankruptcy mode and into record profit mode). Regional/FFD airlines still operate in bankruptcy mode. The day every regional in existence today goes BK or is bought by mainline can't come soon enough.

I don't care if we price the regionals out of the picture sooner rather than later and force mainline to absorb the flying that they should be doing anyway. Southwest is (or started as) a regional that flies 737s and pays pilots ok. Works for them. We have allowed mainline to fly routes/frequencies they otherwise couldn't for as cheap as we can do it. Labor cost is one of the reasons we are able to do it. At some point in this broken regional model, labor prices will have to go up, and outsourcing will end for a large chunk of the flying that exists today (ie the shrinkage you speak of). If ALPA really cared about regionals, they would have made that stance long ago and fought the growth and proliferation of the FFDs.

But it's not just ALPA, it's also us pilots, who are our own worst enemy and don't hold the line hard enough. We always take care of our own short term interests and stab each other in the back and take concessionary contracts to get more flying or whatever, because it benefits us and could help accelerate our move to a career airline.

But, with a surplus of pilots (which there currently is), and enough of us willing to work for poverty wages (and lateral move etc), I'm wasting my thumb strokes. Not enough regional pilots will fight to earn what we are worth, bc we are convinced it's a temporary job and things will get better. And that's what we have been used to for the last decade plus as RJs became more prolific. We are the beaten wife in the whole beaten wife analogy, but are used to it and expect nothing more. JO will fill classes paying people less than they made as a 250 hour CFI. And when he can't, he will throw a few bucks at candidates, enough to staff at the bare minimum level.