The National Mediation Board handles representational elections in airline and railroad elections. The NLRB has no involvement whatsoever in our industry.

I don't point out the lack of knowledge to make fun of you, I point it out because it's indicative of the problem in these ridiculous independent union campaigns. You have a bunch of guys leading the charge for a new independent union that will have no national expertise to assist them, and they don't have a clue about even the basics of running a union. I don't know about you, but when I need representation, I want someone who knows what he's doing, not some newbie who is trying to learn the ropes. The DPA wouldn't just be a single newbie trying to represent a pilot, it woukd be a an entire newbie organization trying to represent 12,000 pilots. For anyone who has ever had any serious involvement in running a union, it's an absurd proposition. We know it's impossible. Only the woefully inexperienced can think it's workable, let alone advisable.

You don't like some things that ALPA does? Then work to change them. Run for office. Bring a resolution to your next local council meeting. Join a committee. Do something productive. Supporting a decertification campaign is not productive.

Well, that's my point as well. How can you possibly support an organization that as of yet has no plan, no proposed structure, no nothing. They don't know how they're going to gauge pilot opinion, because they have no experience and have never had to do it before. If the DPA were to ever actually become a reality, then the new leaders would then have to scramble to figure out how to gauge pilot opinion. Guess what they would probably do? Go to the industry expert on polling, Phil Comstock, the same guy who does ALPA's polling and the polling of all of the other independent pilots unions. So, how has your polling changed? How has your union changed in this regard? It hasn't. Except that the people in the leadership getting the polling results will be inexperienced and ill-equipped to know what to do with it. Not a recipe for success.

Because it will be incapable of doing so. You can't switch from the incredible amount of resources that ALPA provides to an upstart independent union overnight and expect it to have any capability of hitting the ground running in representing 12,000 pilots. It's a crazy proposition.