Originally Posted by
TheProfessor
After reading the MEC Chairman’s letter this morning, I had a thought that I’m sure will end up drawing a lot of spears from the APC crowd.
As previously discussed here, the letter talks about how Flight Ops has tried to pin previous disruptions on us and have waged a sort of internal PR campaign to malign pilots as greedy/lazy/other negative adjectives.
I’ve seen plenty of people here say something to the effect of “since the company is treating us this way, you’re not going to see me hand out a single card or do anything that’s not mandated in 14CFR/PWA/etc…”
I think the letter presents a counter-narrative that talks about how we’ve “continued to lead” by taking care of people and doing some of those very small very simple extraneous things many pilots love to hate.
It seems like the obvious counter to this campaign to malign pilots is not to become even more grumpy and curmudgeony, but to use the ol “kill em with kindness” routine. And by that I mean continuing to do just basic stuff like saying goodbye, handing out cards, flight deck visits, etc...
Obviously I say this within the context of maintaining unity first and foremost (e.g. if hats off becomes a thing then hats are most certainly off). I know this isn’t a popularity contest, but I don’t see the benefit to feeding a flight ops narrative that we’re difficult people by doing things that some people will perceive as being difficult.
inb4 “you’re a management plant/4th floor intern/whatever”. I’m all for extracting maximum value from the leverage we presently have. I’m just suggesting the most effective strategy might be to continue presenting ourselves in the positive way that many people currently view us. The best place to sight your artillery is often from the moral high ground.
Accepting spears.
I mean, where has "killing them with kindness" gotten us so far? For years we've done those extra things, and where is the goodwill from management in return? Fool me once (We ran a little hot), fool me twice (what's a SIL?), fool me three times (MOAB before VEOP), fool me four times (new improved pay promised for years), fool me five times (turning off the phones during crowdstrike), fool me six times (claiming that pay errors are rare), fool me seven times (claiming that CS hold times average ~3 minutes), fool me eight times (23m7/IA fiasco), fool me nine times (trying to unilaterally change how PB days are calculated ), fool me ten times (yanking ability to use PB days), fool me eleven times (critically short staff the airline then blame pilots for the implosion when we've been picking up record overtime), fool me twelve times (max blasting of SC), fool me thirteen times (pre-posted rest to manipulate reserve grid and ignore seniority)…
Need I go on? Maybe one day we'll have people in charge of FLOPS who understand and respect our contributions to the operation, both at a base level and when we go above and beyond. But with the current group in change we can be as kind as baby bunnies and all that will do is make it easier to turn us into rabbit stew...