Exactly.

TA2 is our current contract and is what allows the company to run the operation the way they’re running it today. 84% of the pilot group was a-okay with it, including our former “bulldog,” “maverick” union president, who publicly and proudly announced he voted yes on it.

He’s the same guy who started a recent thread OTOF where, among other things, he essentially told our pilot group, most of whom believe he knows what he’s talking about, that we have little to no real leverage under the RLA because of fairy tale bullsh** he probably heard from CK or some other Texas good ol’ boy SWAPA 1.0 type back in the early 2000’s: all the old reliable tropes, like the mediator will put us on ice forever, the President will just shut us down, and what seems to be his personal fav: Congress will never let us strike.

It’s hard to overstate how much the above hogwash has robbed from our pilot group over the last couple of decades both in terms of cold hard cash and reduced quality of life. If our pilot group had actually believed it had real leverage, would it have betrayed itself, our families, and our profession again and again by voting in lagging contract after lagging contract?

But our pilot group has repeatedly listened to the bullsh** and, possibly outright lies, from its “trusted” union leaders instead of seeking out and discovering the truth that could allow it to realize its own real power.

You’d think, just once in their career, a professional airline pilot would be willing to spend several hours or days trying to learn about the potential power they have access to via their membership in a labor union. But that’s simply not the case. It virtually never happens.

Instead, more often than not, when I bring up the subject of negotiations and how we could have leverage in negotiations, I get yawns in reply from my flying coheart. All these “conservative-minded” airline pilots who supposedly believe in “doing the work,” and “pulling themselves up by their bootstraps,” it turns out, are willing to let the terms of their professional lives be dictated to them by corporate overlords. Isn’t that kind of socialist-y or something?

Go over to the Alaska forum and read the “Will it Pass” thread for a rehashing of the basic logic behind how TA2, and every other substandard contract in our sad union history here has ended up passing. The essential arguments: “Let’s lock in the gainz,” “We’ll get ‘em next time,” “What? You don’t trust our union?”, “What are you willing to give up for that?”, and the ultimate expression of cuckoldness, “Why would the company give us that?”, are all the same as have been repeated here ad infinitum for decades by the overwhelming majority of our pilot group. It’s what we will hear again from our pilots as soon as a TA arrives.

So, ya, if history is at all any guide, I also have no faith in SWAPA securing us an industry-leading contract. They’re way too deep into their backward-a$$, labor-unions-ain’t-a-Texas-thing, no-fly line, trip pull echo chamber to get their collective sh** together.