Originally Posted by
sailingfun
I don't know how NW did it but DALPA has always hired professional negotiators to help with all aspects of a new contract. We normally have a entire top labor law firm at our disposal. They go through with the pilot negotiators every step of the way from forming openers to all the counters. There are no actually table negotiations anymore. Its all done by document exchange. Table meetings are normally only to clarify paper concepts where there might be questions. Do you simply want to eliminate all pilot involvement? Not smart in my opinion because non pilots can't understand the value of some issues.
You beat me to this. If you look back to about this time last year, I was all for looking in to Professional Negotiators and then it was shown to me that, yep DALPA does that. They do not operate the way we did at my previous airline. The process was explained to me, and why there was a full time Negotiation Committee of pilots, what the benefit of pilot involvement was sans only Professional Negotiators, and why the request of Pro Negotiators had already been fully implemented here at DAL long ago. Made sense too. The talks were different. At my previous airline most contract talks were face to face.
I was able to accept the fact, that what was lacking was the explanation of how the process transpired, not what who or what was part of the process. Simply put, I asked, and was educated on the concern I had.