Originally Posted by
bay982
Article from the Wall Street Journal today is pasted below:
The cliff notes, for the lazy readers:
-Strikes are becoming far more common
-Labor has far more leverage than usual due to tight labor market (which is even tighter for pilots!)
-In the recently averted railway worker strike, labor got the best possible outcome by escalating their impasse to the national level. Those who say the RLA puts labor at the disadvantage don’t understand how it works.
We need much more aggressive union leadership, and we need it quickly. It seems clear that we as pilots will not get a better opportunity to restore our contract, possibly for many many years.
Wall Street Journal 16Sep
Strikes Becoming More Common Amid Inflation, Tight Labor Market
There were 180 strikes in the first six months of 2022, according to Cornell University researchers ...
Thanks for sharing that article. Much appreciated.
100% agreed that we need much more aggressive union leadership that both leverages the RLA (something we've never effectively done before here at SWA) and leverages the times we are living in. The article you quoted does a great job of explaining some of those factors.
The railroad dispute that just wrapped up (pending the ratification vote) ought to be intensively studied by all unions, especially RLA-governed unions. The railroad unions, unafraid of and "unconfused" by (to coin a term) the RLA, exploited the economic weapons made available to them by the RLA with brilliant execution and timing. The political environment, approaching the mid-term elections with a famously pro-union President, Democratic control of the House and Senate, and a Democratic majority on the NMB, favored labor for the first time in years.
And the economic situation, with supply chain and labor shortages as well as spiking inflation, all amplified the threat posed by the possibility of 100,000+ rail workers walking off the job.
The rail unions gave us all a master class in how to employ the RLA. We could learn a lot from them. The RLA isn't slanted against labor. It's slanted against the less educated and the more fearful side.
Right now, we're the terrified, knees-knocking eight-year old kid sporting arm floaties falling off the low board into the pool. If we want gold, we've got to graduate to triple-flipping off the ten meter platform with no splash into the water below.
We can't be afraid and we've got to know what we're doing if we want to come out on top for ourselves, our families, and our profession. We've got a long way to go.