Originally Posted by
AxlF16
It's not a hard sell, in fact it's far easier than you want to believe. The hurdle the company must clear in order to get an injunction/TRO is about ¼ inch tall (if that). The questions are simple. Are our actions causing financial harm to the company? Are the losses permanent and ongoing? Yes = TRO. The judge simply says 'honor your contract in the same manner you have been doing'. The company has A **** TON of stats that show how much PP is flown, how much TT is done, how much open time is picked up, etc... From the judges perspective a TRO/injunction prevents irreversible financial harm to the company but doesn't harm the pilot group.
There will, and SHOULD, be plenty discussion of how this impacts individual pilots vs the overall pilot group. Short story is that nobody can MAKE an individual pilot partake in any voluntary parts of the contract, BUT if the overall group changes our behavior (based on company data) the group can suffer consequences.
The company can argue that all day long, what stops individuals that stop picking up from arguing they no longer need the money. If I have picked up every month for the last 5 years maybe I just finished paying off my new boat and don’t need the extra time. The company has no way of knowing why people pick up time or stop picking up time. Maybe my best friend got furloughed and I would rather spend time on my boat with him/her instead of picking up open time. Easiest way to get me back is to pay my friend to head back to work so that I have no one to go onto my boat with. The company doesn’t know and had no reason to know why people pickup/don’t pick up.