It’s pretty enforceable. APA pilots did something very similar in 1999: in reaction to the purchase of Reno Air and acquisition of their lower wage pilots (and AA’s failure to immediately integrate them), APA pilots started calling in sick and not picking up open time.

Soooo, AA management got a TRO against APA basically forcing APA to rein in its pilots - almost exactly like Spirit last year. But....APA pilots doubled down and kept going.

End result was APA got bankrupted with a $45 million dollar fine. They had $36 million in the bank I believe. Their two main exec’s also got personally fined thousands of dollars. Judges typically get very nasty when a person or organization openly acts in contempt of a court order. A bankrupt union is pretty ineffective.

A bunch of passengers filed lawsuits seeking damages from APA. I don’t know if those got very far but there was talk of individual pilots possibly being liable for damages because of the way APA was (is?) set up.

You don’t have to like all of that or agree with it but that’s the way it is. If you’ve spent much time in court, then you know that’s not a place where your notion of fairness matches up very well with the law and the way the legal system see things.

If unions learned to play by the RLA and exploit it, we could all do a lot better. But what the Spirit and AA pilots did were both clearly illegal job actions. Pretty dumb and likely orchestrated by guys who don’t understand the RLA. Ultimately counterproductive for themselves and the profession. Clean kill by the judge.