Originally Posted by
Flytolive
You couldn't be more wrong. The U.S., for better or worse, had over 40% of the airline business and set the standard for the pilot compensation along with Canada, Europe, Australia and a few others. Without ALPA and the other pilot unions you would now be making a fraction of what you are even though your employer, Swire, is one of the most anti-labor firms on the planet. Fortunately for you they still have to pay pilots compensation that is kept well above what the market would bear without pilot unions around the world.
Remember the 49ers!
I respectfully disagree. From the outset, CX had zero Union. The pay and conditions were set by the fact that they had to pay handsomely to recruit people away from home. In today's market, they bear less of that burden, but plenty of people are looking elsewhere.
It there may be some very tenuous historical link to ALPA in the past, but it's been completely independent and at the whim of management for decades here.
Incidentally, unlike Emirates, we only have a small number of Americans at CX. So, what ALPA are achieving now is having much less of an impact on our crewing. I understand EK are losing Americans left and right who are going back home.
If they want to staff their jets, and have to look overseas for the crew, then they have to pay a bit extra. They'll try and find the lowest number, and the bar is set, QED. It's got nothing to do with ALPA. Going back to the birth of the industry 90 years ago and claiming to have set the bar is a little disingenuous in this day and age. The industry has had nearly a century to figure out where to set the bar, regardless of the starting point.
I'm intimately familiar with the 49'ers, which if anything, goes to show that unionisation has little impact here - CX were unionised by that time. It's completely irrelevant in the context of this discussion, and again, zero to do with ALPA.