Sigh...here is a bullet-point summary of numerous hits and misses, on the part of the company, DALPA, and the pilot group...then I am off these boards for awhile!

I got hired at the very end of 96, so some of this occurred before I got hired, related to me by guys senior to me

• Prior to the early 90s DAL had never furloughed
• DAL also never had the jumpseat, even on their own airline
• Ron Allen, DAL's CEO back then, was well known for hating pilots
• In the early 90s, with the first Gulf War and economy in the tank, DAL laid off employees for the first time, including furloughing a lot of pilots
• In the mid 90s we were negotiating a new contract. Ron Allen wanted to develop an "airline within an airline" to "compete with Southwest."
• He demanded that we agree to form a separate "Sunshine" operation, flying our oldest and loudest 737-200s (54 in all). This operation would only "succeed" if the pilots took draconian pay and work rule concessions for that operation.

• If we did NOT agree to this, then he threatened to sell all 54 of the 737s furloughing hundreds more pilots
• Whether good, bad, or simply a lesson to be learned, we agreed to a concessionary contract in 1996. It did give us the jumpseat for the first time. In exchange we took pay and work rule concessions everywhere, and formed the "Sunshine" operation which eventually became Delta Express.
• Per the company Express could only succeed if the pilots took huge pay cuts and work rule concessions. So you had captains making $114/hr out of MCO, while their mainline counterparts made far more.
• However the company screwed up big time in a couple of ways.
• First they just assumed guys would fly up to FAR limits at straight pay. There was no whiteslip pickup limit, and GS only paid time and a half.
• However....they didn't realize that for the Express operation, a Green Slip with Conflict was a better deal than a mainline one! A mainline GSWC pays straight pay and credit for the trip dropped, and straight pay/no credit for the trip flown.
• However in MCO a GSWC paid straight pay for the trip dropped...AND....time and a half for the trip flown. Therefore a GSWC paid 2.5x!
• Couple that with woeful undermanning reminiscent of the 717B today, and the pilots got real smart, real fast.
• It was not a grass roots "lets hose the company to teach them a lesson" thing. It was a "why fly a WS a straght pay, or a GS at 1.5x pay, when we can all prosper with GSWC at 2.5x pay!"
  
• Further, all the trips out of MCO were great trips, and very similar. That is quite unlike say, the 7ER category now, where a senior guy might fly a sweet 3-day ATL-FCO trip, and a junior guy has a cruddy redeye from OAK. So even a senior guy had an incentive to GSWC, knowing that the nice trip he was awarded on the initial bid would be replaced by a similar one. I don't know that a senior 7ER pilot would take that chance, losing a nice trip in exchange for perhaps a poor one.
• So for about two years the MCO guys were making tons of $$ flying almost exclusive GSWC. The important thing to understand is that they couldn't have done this at all if the category was decently staffed. The company thought they had the pilots "over a barrel" but in fact the pilots used the 100% contractually legal tools available to them to change that equation. No "sickout" ala AA, no "no OT" campaign.
• Eventually the company added a lot of pilots to the category and that finally disappeared. However the entire MCO operation was really not that good to begin with, the PBS system they used was poor and eventually discarded, and the whole thing was shut down in the early 2000s.

My real point here is that perhaps DALPA screwed up by agreeing to the concessionary 96 contract in the first place (though that is easy to say in hindsight) but there was no union wrongdoing here. However a couple of times in the late 90s/early 2000s in the runup to C2K we did in fact screw up. We had other "grassroots no OT" campaigns that got some guys sued. The company certainly had their part to play, but we didn't help our cause.

Bottom line is this: if you, or I, or someone else, decides he wants to fly OT--or not fly OT--then that is that pilot's decision to make. That was the brilliance of the MCO example. No one was getting harassed if they flew a GS or WS...just a whole lot of individual decisions. However if we were to "withhold service" as a group--whether a full-blown strike or just a "no OT" directive--then that should be explicitly directed by our union leadership IAW with the Railway Labor Act--there should be no confusion or doubt. Unfortunately in the past--though admittedly long ago and getting longer every day--that was not always the case, thus some legal issues cropped up. Our negotiators and MEC don't need that.

I'm outta here.