Originally Posted by zerozero

I'll respectfully disagree with this part.

Your first point, on the reluctance of the company to reinvest in itself (while spending literally hundreds of millions on stock buybacks) is a good one. But that's nothing new. That's just business as usual. But let's not kid ourselves about the executives being held accountable to either the BoD or shareholders. They ran this company with reckless abandon for six years, pi$$ing off customers and shareholders alike. One investor (Howie) practically begged the CEO (Bill Flynn) to reach a deal with the pilots because the share price had crashed and they didn't even pay dividends. Flynn's response: "I'm a shareholder too".

Ha.

Your last point is the most unfortunate inaccuracy. The union is quite literally looking many years down the road realizing every single miscalculation now will affect the next round of (fake) negotiations in 2026, JUST LIKE every single miscalculation between 2004-2011 affected our negotiations 2016-2021.

The company on the other hand, like a lot of other corporations, treads water, quarter to quarter, back slapping each other for their lucky victories or blaming everyone else but themselves for their missed metrics.

The reason why the company always wins (I'll give you that one) is not because the union isn't forward thinking enough. It's because the court system has become of mafia of prejudiced judges and arbitrators. Labor law is painfully weak in this country. And politically, most union members don't vote with their wallets, they vote in accordance with their TVs.

It's always very easy to blame the victim. I always try to refocus our frustrations on the true sources.

Last point, re: expats coming to Atlas vs. American labor law. I flew with a Canadian who told me, "I had no idea it worked like this. If this was Canada we'd be on strike. If I knew this, I would have never come here."