Originally Posted by
DAL 88 Driver
alfaromeo seemed to be justifying the 42% cut by asserting that our C2K rates were too much. What did he call it... "the richest labor contract in history"? I was just adding some perspective to show that the 42% cut was not justified.
I think if you look at history, you will see that the buying power of a major airline pilot has been relatively consistent from the 1960's all the way through the 1990's. Sure, there have been some ups and downs and isolated examples, but nothing like what we saw in the past decade. Deregulation happened about 30 years ago, right? The massive decrease in the value of our profession didn't happen until over 20 years into deregulation. I really don't think you can blame it on that.
Well, there you go making stuff up. I was trying to point out that the same attorneys that you accuse of failing us, also helped us negotiate the best contract in history. Where do you come off saying I said it was too much? Do you just make this stuff up?
Here is how you justify a 42% paycut. You have a company that loses massive amounts of money 6 years in a row and goes bankrupt. The country has voted for the last 30 years for a government that primarily views labor as a speed bump for management and has passed laws and appointed officials highly slanted away from labor and towards management. Bankruptcy court has become a rubber stamp for management to reject contracts and take away labor's right to strike. It's sort of like giving me St. Mary's prep football team and asking me to take on the Saints. There's no victory there, you can only hope to staunch the bleeding.
That's how you justify a 42% paycut. Every other union, every other labor group, every other airline faced basically the same thing. Southwest management made a gigantic gamble on the future of oil prices and that gamble hit the lotto 1,000 times over. Because of that gamble, SWAPA, who by the way employs the same tactics and strategy of DALPA, has been completely insulated from the devastation of the last decade due to this brilliant (and lucky) move from their management. List out the CEO's of the big 6 airlines in 2001 and tell me how many of those guys are still working in the industry.
You want ALPA to act as some magic force field to protect you from the economic and government forces that have acted to slash the industry and its workers back to what it is today. Tell me how DPA will protect you from that and I will vote for them. Right now, I prefer to stay with an organization that pools our resources and is trying to push the pendulum back to the middle to give us some type of leverage again.
Is ALPA perfect? No. But I am not either and I have never seen any organization ever that is perfect. So I am sure that the magicians in the DPA will kiss our boo-boos and make it all better. This is what the Airways guys said about USAPA. They have produced nothing but pain for their pilots, lawsuits, injunctions, legal bills over $12 million in two years, pilots on furlough, pilots on furlough out of seniority. So sure, lets place our hopes on these three guys who put up a website where they answer their own questions quite glibly:
Q. Alfaromeo, can you leap tall buildings with a single bound?
A. Sure, and I can catch bullets in my teeth and make high grade crude oil out of toenail clippings. I am sure that I can apply all these skills to produce a 90% pay raise in four weeks. It is all quite simple.
On second thought, dump ALPA and vote for me, I just convinced myself.