Originally Posted by
acl65pilot
What many fail to realize is that once you get the regional airlines out from underneath our financial as well as voting influence in the ALPA National structure you will have all of these regionals going after your flying. See RJET and Frontier for a warm up to how bad this will get. Look at AA and Eagle and see what happens when you have two different unions representing pilots under the same corporate structure.
There may be some ugly battles within ALPA, but at Bar states, they are dealt with "In house" and not at the table between three parties. Dump alpa and this is exactly what you will see.
Regional Airlines and Mainline Airlines should NEVER have been lumped together with the same national union in the first place. ALPA National SHOULD have drawn a line in the sand a long time ago with an ironclad, non-negotiable definition of scope separating mainline and regional flying.
The problem as I see it is that somewhere along the line ALPA put it's growth prospects, as an organization, ahead of the needs of it members. ALPA decided to grow for that sake of growing while disregarding the ramifications of representing competitive pilot groups.
Even to this day, ALPA will happily represent a group that continually approves sub-par, industry-lowering contracts, at the expense of under-cutting a struggling pilot group.
ALPA takes 2% from each of its' members and then tells said members that if they want a industry-leading contract they are going to have to fight for it. So that then bears the question...
Why am I paying someone to do a job that they in turn advocate I do myself, while supporting a competing group that is willing to do my job for less???
The way I see it ACL, what you speak of above has ALWAYS been the problem with ALPA as an organization. Sooner or later the person trying to be everybody's friend will indefinitely become everybody's enemy.