Originally Posted by Timbo

The APA did move the needle, once, and in the wrong direction!

In 1984 their pilot group offered their management a pay cut for all new hires, instead of the across the board pay cut their management was asking for.

I spoke with their then BOS base FE rep about this new “B Scale” just before I went to my first AA interview. He told me their logic was this; the company hadn’t hired anyone since 1981 when PATCO (Air traffic controllers) went on strike and were all fired by Ronald Regan. All the Majors canceled flights and started furloughing pilots, except Delta, which is why the employees bought the first 767, now on display in the Delta Museum.

I was flying part 135 at the time, cancelled checks 4 nights a week, and one of my copilots was a furloughed AA pilot, hired in 1979, furloughed in 1981, who later took a job with BOS tower reading my my clearance, until he was recalled in 1984.

So…AA was in contract negotiations starting in 1982 and told the APA they wanted to hire “thousands of pilots” but they couldn’t afford to at their pay rates because of the lost revenue from the PATCO strike, so the company wanted an across the board pay cut of like 7%. Well according to the BOS FE rep I spoke to, the APA didn’t believe AA was going to hire thousands of pilots, and they’d had hundreds on furlough since 1981, so the APA said to management, “If you’re going to hire thousands, then pay them LESS, because we have given ENOUGH, and we are NOT taking a pay cut!”

So the B Scale was born. All “new hire” pilots at AA starting in September 1984 were paid much less than their A Scale pilots.

OK….so what happened next? How did the AA B Scale proliferate to all the ALPA carriers??

ALPA in their brilliance of Monkey See, Monkey Do negotiating strategy (pattern bargaining) bowed (bent over!) to all the other Majors management’s, demanding a B Scale because; We need to Be Competitive With American!”

So yeah, APA moved the needle, in the WRONG direction!

Why ALPA National didn’t tell all the other management teams to pound sand is beyond me, but I got to enjoy 5 years of 30% reduced earnings from September 1985-1990.

Don’t even get me started on how ALPA allowed our narrow body flying to be outsourced to RJs, throughout the 1990s- to today, and our International wide body flying to be outsourced to our 21 JV partners…