Originally Posted by
Dash8Pilot
While I think it would be better long term for the pilots to have all the groups merged, I'm also confident from what you posted that Jerry and Chip have all the legal room they need to prevent such a merger from taking place.
Your contract mentions air carriers and their affiliates, but it never specifies that if an affiliate is the legal purchaser that lists at their parent company must also be merged. It only specifies that whoever purchases XJT or is purchased by XJT must merge lists. In this case that means ASA and XJT.
This might be the case, only time will tell.
Originally Posted by
Dash8Pilot
One of the things you will learn as part of the SkyWest Inc. family is that Jerry and Chip don't do anything without doing their due diligence, having a long term plan, and considering all the contingencies. They aren't the short sighted and inept managers that plague this industry.
I agree. But in this case I strongly suspect that they are no TOO concerned about SKW getting sucked into a SLI. Several reasons for this...
- During the last union drive JA stated that he wasn't too concerned with the outcome, he did not feel it would be a major game changer to have a pilot union. The reason is that they don't mistreat their pilots more so than other (union) regionals so a union at SKW will not have a lot of room to make improvements without actually damaging SKW's competitiveness...nor will there be tremendous motivation on the part of the pilots to stick it to the company (like say 9E). The PRIMARY reason INC doesn't want the SKW pilots in a union is because it would set a bad precedent for the other employee groups...
- Given the change in NMB policy on union votes, it is MUCH more likely that SKW will go alpa next time around. This is my opinion but I think INC feels that same way (they fought the rule change). Since it's probably going to happen anyway eventually, INC probably did not want to let a potential SLI torpedo or seriously complicate their expansion plans.
They would still prefer SKW remain non-union (or at least delay the inevitable), so they are merging XJT with ASA in the hopes of containing alpa within that entity, but I think that is a fairly low priority in the grand scheme of things. I would give an XJT lawsuit about 50/50 on this...their contract language is not really airtight when you get into holding companies with multiple airlnes, but I think the INTENT of the language is crystal clear. But of course intent doesn't tend to hold up in court in the presence of written contracts which do not articulate the intent well. This is why pilot groups need to hire real professional contract lawyers and not copy/paste some other regional's boilerplate or use some cut-rate drunk shyster whose brother-in-law is on the MEC
