Originally Posted by
echelon
Serious question for you, the resident naif: What do you, in your completely uninformed, sophomoric, opinion, would happen if all the people in a particular group who are vocally dissatisfied followed your low-effort advice and actually just left? This goes for countries, airlines, whatever. What would happen if all the people who most strongly demand change just left?
I'll tell you before you pull a muscle trying figure it out: You'd be left with an airline comprised of only all the other milquetoast schmucks who are happy to go with the flow, eat what's put on their plate, resign to being second seventh (or is it 8th yet?) best, and then come on to the forums and preach sanctimoniously to anyone with legitimate gripes about how it's their attitude that's the problem.
"Love it or leave it" is and always has been a total fallacy, just like the rest of your post. No, a 1 year upgrade in JFK isn't a good enough reason for someone with seniority here to leave. No, not everyone is able to commute. And NO, I don't expect you to be able to comprehend why it's possible to be dissatisfied and demand better conditions but be unable to simply quit but you should give it a shot.
Or it would be more leverage. While I'd like to think the Apr 1 demonstration brought them to their knees, it would seem they are now seriously negotiating because they see what the pilot market looks like. People are headed to the big 3 in droves, and many pilots are not seeing the benefit of working for a national single fleet carrier (like your Frontier, Spirit, sorta jetBlue and Alaska). Anyone at the regional level would probably pick the big 3 or the big 2 cargo. Why even go to F9/NK/AS/B6? Love it or walk with your feet is the norm for just about every career except airline pilots. Our seniority ties us down and therefore we have zero career portability. When it comes to negotiating leverage, it's a huge hit. 2020-2021 airlines lose billions and negotiations stall. But for 2022 it's been a complete 180 and shaping up to be a pilot's market for a long time. Most national carrier managements are starting to see that and getting serious about negotiations. I'll admit I was wrong in 2019 when I said that pilot attrition wouldn't amount to any amount of leverage, but today it seems it is the #1 leverage point for negotiations for the non big 4 pax carriers.