Originally Posted by Bananie

Well that right there puts it in a nutshell. When asked to make a hard decision about what you are going to do about staffing, you punt and go on the attack. Please tell me, with all your infinite wisdom, that you understand that if staffing problems are your leverage, you have to do something about their staffing problems in order to use that leverage. You can't say to them that you have leverage over staffing and then tell them you won't do a thing about it.

So instead of making a hard choice, you take the coward's way out and simply sit back and criticize the choices that others were forced to make.

This is exactly the point I was making before. Leadership is about making hard choices. You think there is some world where you walk into a room and make your contract demands and management simply nods their heads and signs the paper. That world doesn't exist, it never existed, and it will never exist. So if you ever want a contract, you need to get back to the real world. Your sanctimonious crap is just sanctimonious crap. I have more time flying Delta jets around than you do so I really don't need a lecture about "flying the line". What a bunch of crap.

If you examine the cases of US Airways pilots in their merger and the United pilots in their merger you will see the contrast in leadership and results. The US Airways pilots took the easy, cowardly way and simply sat on straight date of hire. They never had to answer for making tough choices to their pilots but in the end they screwed them over by making themselves irrelevant to their seniority integration.

The United MEC took a different path. Instead of sticking on an unreasonable position like straight date of hire, they made the tough choice to go for a hybrid list. The webboard jockeys, just like you, criticized them for being surrender monkeys and weaklings and I'm sure for "not flying the line". In the end, the seniority list was built around the ideas of the United pilots and they benefited from that greatly. They were lucky that the webboard crowd was ignored.

That is what the real world is about. Making tough choices in an imperfect world. Guys like you get to ride above that by standing back and throwing rocks at people that get in there and make those tough choices. Well bully for you. I know you think you are tough but I see you as weak; too weak to make the tough choices. So maybe you should try to put your big boy pants on and actually get in and make some of those choices. I mean, you say it's easy, so you should have this all figured out in a jiffy. By the way, I prefer to work only on Tuesday so see if you can get that fixed up for me.