I'm anti most unions, nothing against LCCs...not a commercial pilot nor do I pretend to be btw. I know how pattern bargaining works, I'll give you a few examples, and then address the US airline industry at the end:

1. US steel industry: pattern bargaining led to higher wages and no incentive to be efficient or cost-competitive, and was a significant driver of the demise of the US steel industry as Asian imports flooded the market with lower-cost product. There were 500k steel workers in the US in the 50s, 150k in the 80s, and 80k today. The US moved from a net exporter of steel to a net importer, reliant on other countries.

2. US auto industry: pattern bargaining led to higher wages and no incentive to be efficient or cost-competitive, and was a significant driver of the demise of the US auto industry as Asian imports flooded the market with lower-cost product. There were 600k unionized auto workers in the US in the 80s, 200k pre-GFC, and 140k today. The US moved from a net exporter of autos to a net importer, reliant on other countries. Total US auto workers have fallen, but not as drastically, as the majority of US auto jobs today are jobs under foreign companies that have plants in the US. Those firms specifically set up shops in states that had laws to allow them to avoid unionization. This contributed significantly (along with the above details on the steel industry) to the decline of the rust belt and ascent of the sunbelt.

3. US trucking industry: pattern bargaining led to higher wages and no incentive to be efficient or cost-competitive, and with mobsters running the unions and no ability to import a service as the US did with physical products, rates were regulated at inflated levels, passing the cost on to the consumer. After deregulation, prices fell 30+%, and consumers benefitted.

4. Scandinavian manufacturing industry: pattern bargaining was taken a step further by mandating equal wages across industries, and firms that could not meet productivity targets necessary to support those wages would fail. Firms were incentivized to invest in automation and efficiency, and while prices still ended up higher than what overseas competitors could offer, quality was an actual differentiating factor, allowing many industrial manufacturing companies to thrive, although at the expense of potential start-ups who couldn't compete in such capital intensive industries without offering a significant portion of compensation in the form of stock/options/warrants like international (esp. US) companies could. This can be argued as a positive outcome, unlike the above 3 which are uniformly negative.

If a system like the Scandinavian system (or one where pattern bargaining worked and all commercial pilots were paid the ~same) were enacted in the case of the US airline industry, it would simply mean LCCs wouldn't exist today, and start-ups wouldn't have been created...we would have a 4/5 company oligopoly, and prices would skyrocket, undoing the enormous impact that de-regulation had. The routes hit hardest would be the leisure routes and smaller market routes that LCCs frequent, disproportionately hurting lower and middle class consumers. I totally understand LCC pilots wanting to be paid the same as their peers, especially given that the average LCC pilot is just as good as the average legacy pilot, and a lot of this just comes down to luck. But that is not a sound economic or financial model.

Anyway, I'm not going to opine anymore on this specific topic b/c it's not my place, and I understand that many posts on here are just to reasonably vent. Thought the financial reality should be posted once.