You're right. My apologies for remembering wrongly what you had written.

The problem is that our bargaining agent does so much more than what you allude to. Through their power of the purse strings and owner of all lawyers and staff members, ALPA national directs what they think is in the best interest of ALPA national. Do the local unions have the power to go up against ALPA national? Absolutely not. Do the the local rank and file pilots have the power to vote down TA's before they ever get to be contracts? Aboslutely...no question about that.

Now here is where the conflict of interest comes in: Due to ALPA's representation of us and the airlines to which we've sold our flying, a problem arises when local guys try to negotiate back the flying that they've sold. That action will hurt the airline that we've sold our flying to. That airline is also represented by ALPA. The evidence is clear to me that ALPA does not want to hurt the regionals, and uses their considerable influence (as listed in the paragraph above) to skew negotiations, skew the message to rank and file pilots, and pre-ordaine the results of both the negotiations and the vote. If ALPA weren't conflicted by needing to represent both sides of this tug of war, I believe ALPA wouldn't use its influence in a negotiations process that should only be local.

I believe that is patently false.

DPA simply sees ALPA as poorly serving the pilot group. I profoundly agree. Just like any poor performing employee or vendor in my business, I want them fired. It's strictly business. DPA is another vendor with a message of better representation. I'm listening.

Carl