Tony,
7 years ago, the admonition by the company of "with you or without you" was real. 100 million was budgeted for setting up the contingency planning for this. The company figured that at least 1000 pilots would cross the picket. Throw in every operator they could get their hands on to contract freight and this was the plan. What you presume here is that the airline would lose a tremendous base of business and would never really pull this plan off. Are you correct? We will never really know since the union backed down. If the union had carried out its threats, the surviving FedEx system was forecast by the company to be dramatically downsized from it pre-strike predecessor. Over time, it would be built back up to pre-strike level of service. The company was prepared to downsize to do this and had spent 25 million on this program when Fato said "lets talk". The resultant contract was the company’s last best offer less that 25 million
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Last edited by cub pilot; 04-25-2006 at 02:07 PM.