It’s worth reading the grievance decision linked in RG’s email. The arbitrator says that the contract is too complex to understand. Ironically, he began with a conversation about how to make maple syrup and alcohol.

The union was implicated for presenting arguments to the 5-member board that were not framed in the same way to the 4-member board. That was a strategic mistake no doubt.

In any event, this is a lose-lose for obvious reasons.

A party that boasts how it wins so much, and then laments the opposition’s change in strategy going forward, tells us all we need to know.

Hopefully this is a wake up call to ALPA that we need to construct the contract language to adapt to the decreasing intellectual capabilities of the system boards.