Originally Posted by
DeadHead
As pilots, our responsibilities, in a nutshell, are from getting the metal moved safely from "A" to "B".
As Management, the responsibilities, or goals, are running an efficient business model while maximizing profits.
Management doesn't care HOW we, as pilots, accomplish our responsibilities, they just want it done. Speaking for myself, I really don't care about the details, nor am I interested in, how the management steers the company onto a successful course. I just want to see the company succeed, for obvious reasons.
That being said, I don't think we should sit down at the bargaining table with the mindset of preventing the company from losing money. Our concerns are to improve salaries, QOL, and work rules while the concern of management is to save a few bucks on labor. Make no mistake about it, pilot labor is just another cost to management, nothing more, nothing less.
I agree. But, there's a big difference between management and pilots. Management can vote themselves huge bonuses, rape the company and run it into the ground, and then bail out and go elsewhere. They are only limited by their individual talents and ability to sell themselves in the open market place.
We as pilots decided many years ago to abandon that approach. Instead our careers, and our fortunes, are tied to a seniority list, which in turn is tied to the fortunes of an individual company. This made sense during the regulated era as bankruptcies were rare, but since deregulation has been an abysmal failure.
Now, without any type of portable seniority, we are the only (relatively) well paid group tied to our own company. When the company fails, we fail, and get to choose starting all over in the profession we know, or abandoning it and starting all over in a new profession. Two lousy choices. That is why, absent change, DALPA recognizes that for its pilots to be successful, ultimately DAL must be successful. Dubinsky's choke the golden goose philosophy doesn't work in the modern environment.
Furthermore, while we may have become "too big to fail", we have also become "too big to strike". I don't see ANY President ever permitting another nationwide strike by a carrier of our size. The deck is stacked as deeply against labor as I've ever seen it in my 20+ years in the industry. As a result, we have virtually no tools left. We should be expending our resources on changing the RLA so as to level the playing field, but I don't see much movement in that direction. Instead, again as DALPA recognizes, our best hope is to have a wildly profitable company, as that is the best chance that they will throw us a few morsels come contract time.