Originally Posted by
gloopy
What's the answer? I don't know. As a first step I've always been in favor of eliminating the punitive "first year pay" (and sometumes second year too) being dramatically lower than the yearly steps when compared to 3rd year pay. We've come a long way towards remedying that. Hotels, uniforms and other things have taken some of the sting out of starting over. However its likely not enough to stop another in-distress airline from negotiating whatever they need to survive.
The answer(s) are found in the Admin Manual. Literally the Flight Crew Training Manual for the Consitution and ByLaws VOL1.
A rejected takeoff for not having the flaps set begins with numerous procedural errors going back to the after-start flow.
Applied to scope, the Admin Manual lays out the committees, who should be on these committees, the work and the reports they create, who they report to and how they resolve conflicts BEFORE the President authorizes bargaining and even a redundant error-catching process to follow if bargaining gets to a point where there is a conflict. (lets call that these the after start, analysis of the WDR, the Taxi check and the before takeoff checklists)
In any event, ALPA MEC Chairmen should be calling Executive Boards any time bargaining ends in a demonstrable error affecting thousands of careers. I've not seen anyone ever address bargaining failures. Given our safety culture, I do not understand why those same tools are not applied to our representational work.
The Admin Manual contains the collective wisdom of all ALPA Reps up to that point in time. It is negligent of our administrators to not know what is in that book and live it in their administrative careers serving pilots.