Originally Posted by
baseball
I don't think the political make up of the white house or the 3 member panel (2 majority members) makes much of a difference. Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, nor Barack Obama were very friendly to the airline industry.
President's don't really view us as "labor." They view us on par with white collar professionals. If the white house feels joe six pack isn't going to go from Chicago to Orlando on their family vacation due to an impending organized job action then and only then will the white house pay attention to pilot-land.
Getting a release under any administration is somewhere between a long shot and a moon shot. You'd have to have years of well documented, bad faith, downtrodden, down-and-out below the belt negotiations for that to happen.
I wouldn't call the previous administration pro-labor. They were just big government and anti-business. I think of this current government is pro-US economy and less government regulation. In both scenarios labor is simply labor. with 2.5% unemployment I would argue that the current climate is pro labor simply by providing a climate in which companies can survive and thrive.
Whatever gains we as a pilot group hope to gain, we should be looking at ourselves to provide the leverage in order to do the heavy lifting. I wouldn't count on this NMB, our future NMB's to do it for you.
Possibly. We were asked specifically why we have not gone the NMB route yet. I agree, it is too early to go there, as was stated, we are making progress, just not much.
However my point is that if we were to get to that point, because of the White House, the NMB option is not currently a viable avenue for realistic contractual gains we are looking for.
However, with the announcement of Kirby this morning, I have pretty much lost any hope of getting a contract this next decade--making the NMB argument possibly a bit stronger, but also further off in the future. Scope was being scrutinized before, now it will be under full assault.