Hi Nu,

Maybe I shouldn't say "proxy" as much as "actual reps and committee people". And maybe you're neither.

My point is that noone here discloses their role in union politics, but the more I read, the more I realize it's people that are close to the action that are posting, under the guise of being, you know, "just a pilot". It's hard to piece together, just like it's hard to piece together the real ages of people on a social network site, but all the sudden it feels like, darn, I'm the only actual fifteen-year old teenage girl that wants to talk "Twilight" on here, and everyone else is a 55-year-old fat man trying to get me to a "Starbucks" for a 10PM "meeting".

As far as Committees go, I think I know where to start with the "contact issue". If you want to have access to committees, then have it, but you definitely should have to report it.

Why?

I understand you guys up North were so paranoid about each other that you had to have dual structures on every committee, and those dual structures reported to whomever they were influenced by. Under no circumstances would I want to ever see that again. I want a stronger admin reporting to an even stronger MEC, which will be made up of strong, responsive (to the pilots) LEC officers. Committees need to get their marching orders from the MEC, via the admininstration, or the MEC itself if the administration is filtering out the message (in which case it gets canned). So a "contact" between individual LEC officers and the committees, who work on behalf of all councils, is either fact-finding by the LEC, which is innocent enough (in which case reporting it isn't a problem), or it's an attempt to give direction (in which case reporting it is a must). It's that simple. There is no "inertia" in monitoring access to committees that work for everyone. That's actually clean and simple.

If your problem is that the administration is not responsive to the MEC, a charge I've heard on the South side as well, then you may have a legitmate gripe. In that case, the MEC would rightfully act on it by getting a better administration. But I sure as hell don't want committe actions driven by political links between individual LEC's and officers, that shortcut the influence of other LEC's.