Completely different. A FFD carrier really only has two costs: real estate and labor, and revenue is fixed for each flight. The only way to make more profits is to gain more flying but the majors like to shuffle it around on short contracts and diversify heavily amongst the carriers to lower risk and FFD carriers bidding against each other.

If you were the NMB and a FFD management was telling you that they operate on razor thin margins and the only way to give labor group what they want is to ask for more money from the major partner. This would result in loss of flying and put the company in jeopardy. Would you have much choice but to ice negotiations until labor moves? This is assuming what the management is telling you is true. In FFD it mostly is. It’s a terrible business model.

Frontier is completely different for so many reasons. Mainly, they sell their own tickets and control how they generate revenue. They also happen to be quite good at and are printing money. Pretty hard to refute. This is no more than stonewalling by a business friendly, labor hating, political organization.