Yes, much like today "everybody" was hiring and there were twice as many airlines! Most new guys picked an airline based on their living preferences, if you were a west coast guy you didn't consider Delta but looked at Western instead. When the VP of Flt Ops came to speak to our new hire class someone asked him, "Why no jumpseat?" He said that would be a perk only the pilots would enjoy and that wouldn't be fair to all the other employees. He went on to say, "At Delta we try to treat everyone the same, you guys already make a lot more money than the flight attendants and mechanics so giving you something they can't have just wouldn't be right."

In later years after I was displaced to the MD11 in ATL (when BOS closed in 1996) after talking with senior Captains I found out the "real reason" they didn't want us to have the jumpseat was because the (junior) ATL L15 international pilots didn't want the Senior pilots from all the other bases commuting into ATL to fly the highest paying jet (L15) for their last 3 years to bump up their FAE. There was still some animosity between the North East pilots, Western pilots and the RDs, so the RDs made it as difficult as possible for the Western and North East pilots to get to ATL for those high paying International jobs.