While some union trades will have a union hall where your hall seniority determines your work opportunities, those trades are very portable: You can work 2 days at company A, then 3 days at company B, then take 5 days off. So you're often not really even employed by one company.

This would probably never work for us due to the regulatory requirements associated with working at a particular airline...the training overhead associated with swapping jobs would be too high. And the only way to fix that would be standardizing all aircraft equipment and operating procedures throughout the US...not a chance in h&ll...

Their is still too much benefit to retaining some loyalty to one's own company...SWA and AA pilots have faired reasonably well by working with, not against their employers in the post 9/11 collapse.


I think the best we can realistically accomplish is a national minimum standard for pilot pay and work rules, pro-rated for number of seats. This would baseline a minimumlivable wage (ex. $40K) for lowest entry level. This could be accomplished by the existing unions, ALPS, SWAPA, APA.

Also despite what was originally stated, it is vital that ALL pilots are represented by the same union, or at least unions that are willing to cooperate with one another. The mainline guys are starting to realize that by totally disregarding the needs of the regional guys, they have created a monster that is already going to take a large bite out of their collective ass. A separate regional union would only serve to further undermine the industry as a whole because it would just turn into an us-vs-them free-for-all. This would only benefit a very few senior career regional captains who could make a little more money if their regional were to operate 737 or buses...and those guys are out there waiting to strike too...

Unity is what worked for the unions originally, and that's what we have to get back to.