Originally Posted by
Bamauofa
I was just wondering what everyones opinion would be to forming one union regional industry wide. The majors tried to do this back in the 70's but if we could do it now we could hopefully quit whipsawing each other and set a higher pay level across the board.
This often gets proposed...
In order to be effective, you'd have to bring most if not all the regional airlines onboard. Do you think ALPA would let ASA, Comair, Air Wisconsin, Expressjet, or any other pilot group go without a fight? Could you get Skywest onboard with representation? Could you get RAH away from the IBT?
Besides, many ALPA regionals have been and currently are whipsawed against other ALPA regionals (see PSA/Piedmont/Mesa/Air Wisconsin in the Airways system, or Comair/ASA/Pinnacle/Mesaba in the DeltaWest system) and its doubtful changing the bargaining agent would make that stop.
In order to end the whipsaw and set a higher level of pay across the board, a large majority of the individual pilots making up individual pilot groups needs to put their own best interests on pause, for at least a little bit, and accept some short-term sacrifices (in pay, work rules, growth, etc) in order to achive long-term strategic gains.
...and is that really possible?