Originally Posted by
BeatNavy
You’re missing a really big part of why unions are necessary for airlines. In every other profession, your skills and experience go with you. If company X isn’t paying you enough, you can go to company Y and you can start at or above your current pay and position. In the airline world, if after 5 or 10 years working at airline x, the aren’t paying enough, you can’t go to your same seat/longevity at airline Y. You are beneath even the most junior guy who started there before you. That, coupled with being held under the RLA which absolutely handcuffs us and works in management’s favor, requires unions to be able to negotiate and improve pay/QOL and fight to improve things where you are. Free market forces can’t work in the airline pilot world. Without union support, companies have a huge advantage on an uneven playing field.
That is becuase the unions want it that way. If the seniority system went away tomorrow and a 737 driver could walk away from Alaska to SWA tomorrow what do you think management would do? But yet unions think the seniority system is the best thing since beer. It’s like pilots have Stockholm syndrome.
If that went away and I wasn’t forced to join the union I would happily pay my union dues. But my career is literally held at gun point by the unions because they did some awesome things in the past. At what point do we stop worshipping the unions becuase of things they did decades ago?