Originally Posted by
tallpilot
The best idea floated prior to this mess was adding minimum pay rates for regional flying to scope. Then slowly raising them to eventually eliminate the arbitrage. That might work but requires a lot of co-operation.
Now I think there are bigger fish to fry and it will be a while before this topic is on negotiating committee priority lists again.
Unless you plan to add the minimum wage rates to FA's, Station Agents, MX, Ground Crews and everybody else it will always be cheaper to run at a regional.
The real issue is the RLA. Originally designed to protect the status quo, it desperately needs revision commensurate with modern business practices.
When the RLA was written, you could not tell a PanAm pilot to take these concessions or we will give your flying to TWA. Yet that is the exact dynamic in play at the regional level. However much flying the mainline decides to send to the regionals (they'd send all of it if they could) then gets shopped tot he lowest bidder. All regionals have similar operating fixed costs. Gate space, planes, ground equipment, office space... it all costs the same. So, where do they make their money? By reducing labor costs. This lead to a continual downward pay and wage pattern. The only way to stop it, is to modify the RLA such that you can't threaten to give the flying to somebody else if you don't take concessions. Then over time the wages and work rules will improve. At some point it will then make sense to eliminate the excess administration costs and just bring the flying all back in house.
Rome wasn't built in a day. Build a good foundation to effect change and let business and the market take it's course.
It's the RLA that needs change. The problem you will find is that the lawyers at ALPA and Teamsters have ZERO interest in trying to fix the RLA. I once spent 3 hours listening to a steady parade of one ALPA National Attorney after another make speeches at a Board of Directors meeting why they did not want us to direct them to work to modernize the RLA. Their thought process can be summed up like this:
1. After all these years, we (the lawyers) have a really good idea what it all means based upon countless cases over the years, so we are really comfortable working with it as is....
2. They are afraid that if they make a move t get changes to the RLA that management PAC's will move to get changes that hurt us even more than the RLA currently does.
That is the very short version of three hours worth of speeches. The problems I responded to them with was....
1. We aren't really interested in how easy, or how well, or how comfortable the attorneys are working with the existing RLA, since the RLA is NOT working for their clients, us.
2. If fear of what management might try to do is your best reasoning for not trying to fix something, then why do we ever sit down at a negotiating table with them? An ARC of stakeholders could easily draft common sense revisions. The fact is, management is not afraid of increased costs; they are only afraid of increased costs if the increased costs only apply to them. If the changes apply to everybody evenly, it's just a cost of doing business.
End result, the rest of the committee and BOD members refused to order the lawyers to work to better the RLA.... and ALPA and Teamsters are pretty much the same when it comes to that issue. So, until the field is leveled through the RLA, every management will resist anything that puts them on a different playing field than the competition.
Fix the RLA and over time the rest will sort itself out. Build the foundation.