Originally Posted by Cujo665

As long as you keep fighting with each other, the company wins.
Each pilot group will eventually do what is best for themselves. That is the nature of this business model. It isn't like AA, Delta or United, you do not own your flying and in most cases don't even own your planes, they're leased from ATSG-CAM.
You can't tell an AA pilot to take concessions or we'll give your flying to Delta. The business model ATSG and many ACMI rely on is being able to shift the flying to any of their subsidiary companies at will. As long as they can do that, then you can only fight for so long before all your flying has been transferred and the furlough-layoff-shutdown notice comes. Then add into the mix the customer shopping around for the lowest bid and it exasperates the downward pressure.

The real story is the RLA is broken. It was written at a time that never envisioned the outsourced business model in use at the regional industry or in the ACMI industry. None of the labor unions want to try to fix it either. There was a move in 2014 at the ALPA National BOD meeting to have the ALPA-PAC make updating the RLA to be commensurate with modern business practices. That resulting in the Legislative Affairs subcommittee going into prolonged executive session while a 3.5 hour parade of ALPA lawyers one by one gave little speeches why doing that was a bad idea. It all boiled down to two things.
1 - If the unions get to make changes to the RLA, managements will be right there pushing for their changes
2 - The union lawyers have had these laws, rules, regulations, arbitrations, and decisions for so long that they are very comfortable with it as is and have a good ability to work with it as is.

Several members then pointed out that the issue was not if the RLA worked well for the lawyers, but that it doesn't work well at all for the pilots paying their salaries. The movement died in subcommittee.