Originally Posted by BeatNavy

Here’s an explanation of the effects of “selling scope” or not having any.

A lot of Alaska’s former 737 flying has turned into e175 flying by SkyWest and horizon. At one point greater than 50% of the daily departures of the 3 legacies were done by regionals, many on mainline (hub to hub) routes. I was at a regional and flew LAX-IAH among many other 2-3 hour legs. What “region” is that? Mainline flying got siphoned off to slave wage regionals, delaying people from getting on the seniority list, outsourcing flying that would otherwise add airframes and jobs to majors, and significantly contributing to the lost decade, and lowering the bar for everyone with respect to wages and lifetime earnings.

Scope was sold by the legacies for a few buck hourly gains (or for fewer concessions), because those guys already got theirs and were on the list, and screwed everyone behind them. ALPA allowed this. Pilots are greedy. Management played ALPA/legacy pilots against everyone else in the industry (to include even some of their own who got furloughed from legacies) and made regionals huge. This was one of the darkest spots in our professions history. This “commuter feed” morphed from little turboprops to 76 seat jets and screwed people...hard.

ALPA has acknowledged screwing the industry by allowing scope to be sold, and now that a bunch of regional guys are at the majors, management knows they can’t sell more/bigger regionals to legacy pilots (scope is a function of their pilot contracts). Scope sales is generall a nonstarter now.

Now management seems to be going after scope on the widebody front. Delta passed their TA with a give in widebody scope that DAL seems to keep using to park and not replace Delta widebodies with. Sonthe highest paying and best career jobs at DAL are being eroded. How are they doing it? Joint ventures. These JVs enable delta to fly pax on widebodies that cost significantly less to operate than DAL widebodies. DAL had 787s on order. Order was canceled. But DAL flies DAL passengers on Aeromexico’s 787s. DAL owns 49% of Aeromexico. Their pilots make significantly less than US 787 pilots. That’s one example of JVs, but there are many, flying DAL pax across the pacific and Atlantic.

This is a long convoluted post showing effects of scope gives. If management could outsource all flying to keep profit margins higher, they would. They’ve proven that. They’ve historically exploited pilots number one weakness (greed) to pass scope sales, hoodwinking us into thinking it was the best short and long term course of action for the company and its pilots. We’ve lost billions because of it. Hopefully now enough in the industry know about the destroyed livelihoods caused by it they won’t let it happen again. This is why everyone is ****ed at the Alaska arbitration award. This is why scope is the first section in a contract. I hope in 5-10 years all 76 jets are operated in house by majors.

If our 60 E190s were given to SKW to operate, or we just got rid of 30-60 of them and replaced with contracted E175s for our markets that need a smaller plane, our seniority list would stagnate or shrink (furloughs) for years to come. SKW is salivating to do a deal with us...that’s what regionals need to grow. Our management has always said they want to operate everything organically and not outsource because they want to tightly control the product. They need to put that in writing in section 1 of our CBA.