Naw, it's not heated- I'm good as long as you are. So let's continue. I pay ALPA dues presumably as do you (I sure hope you pay dues there...). But, after you have been beaten down long enough you begin to believe the corporate crud you are being fed and you fall into a (bad) pattern of behavior... they call it beaten child syndrome? I know that as a pilot I have the stereotypical emotional maturity of a 5-year-old , so battered-child syndrome is apt. (Try being junior-manned every other day with 500 pilots junior to you... then assigned below your min days off... then WX canceled with no pay protection... then delayed on the ramp so you work 5 hours and get paid 3... over and over and over... GRRRR.) But I digress...

Let's add another twist to my little story from above to answer your claim that I want ALPA to do everything for me (?) ALPA national wanted us to take this sucky contract that had scope (CA/Pres. whats-his-name-at-the-time wouldn't sign anything else). We were also scared that Freedom-A was where the work was going permanently (non-union): reference the fact that empty CRJ-200's were being pushed back from gates in PHX only to be replaced by 900's- Freedom-A birds with Freedom-A crews. Pay protection for the Mesa crew??? Heck no! We are no longer in the realm of cushy arm-chairs toto, this is the real world of whipsaw bargaining. So, when our negotiating guys made an offer- "We'll take what you (JO) want as long as you give us unaltered scope language and fold Freedom back into the union," JO said, "F-it, ok," (laughing to the bank at the time *see below for the flip-side). Remember, this was also happening in the fresh aftermath of 9-11.

So, the contract was born and the one-time bottom-feeding Mesa pilots were crushed into continuing to be bottom-feeders in a job environment that was/continues to be generally hostile to labor. So, here are a few questions I think are relevant to your post above:

Am I (ERJ-Driver) alone strong enough to fight JO? No.

Is the MAG pilot group strong enough to fight corporate America and the greed of the Bush administration (realizing that the politically appointed mediators will never OK a strike and that we continue to have our asses handed to us in court over legitimate contract complaints)? We have not been, and it remains to be seen what will happen next. Probably No.

Will the MAG pilot group need solidarity from within and support from without? You bet your sweet @ss we will, and we've been trying to generate it no thanks to guys like you who would rather sling mud than be a union brother.

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Let's shift gears once again, and rewind to your sentiment that anyone is a bottom-feeder who uses Mesa as a revolving door to "somewhere better". Above, I offered numbers up that Mesa has lost about 450 pilots this year, half of whom are F/O's. Do you know how much a training event costs? Let's see... 1000/hour in the sim, 8 4-hour lessons (if no additional training is needed), 1 checkride and loft. That's about 40K without instructor costs or books, classrooms etc. This year alone, Mesa has had to pay out 18,000,000 in sim costs alone, and the year is barely half-way through.

I figure that the best way to hurt JO is to come here for a year, let your training contract expire and move on to something better. The more often this happens, the more likely management will be... agreeable at the conference table.