A good post, Gloopy, but about the part I quoted...

I've never heard anyone at American brag about how good their scope clause is, but if they step out of line, soon enough there will be two active Eagle pilots to give them a quick one with the back of their hand for talking smack. As far as Southwest goes, I don't think they ever, ever had a meaningful attempt by management to introduce the little beer-cans, because their management has a different concept of the product, and was too busy handing our lunch to everyone else with 737's to be saddled with a bunch of high CASM RJ's. As for CAL, I don't know if their management could find RJ pilots willing to fly for lower costs per seat-mile.

I don't know why Splash insists on saying that ours is better. Maybe he's sick of the DPA guys trying to hijack the issue in order to connect, whereas they actually have nothing to offer? The fact is that our Scope clause is awful. It's not awful because the guys that were in office during BK failed us, it's awful because the guys that were there under the threat of BK freaked out, and these were the same guys that that tried to sell a few more RJ's for payrates that are now extinct, and they came on the heels of guys that were trying to sell more for the quaint satisfaction of knowing 550 of them and their buddies made out like pedophiles left in charge of a pre-school.

The constant, of course, has been that the pilot group has been sort of asleep, and let this happen. Now, we want to take zero responsibility, and chalk this up to some other party, in this case "DALPA".

The bad news, of course, is DALPA is... us.

The only reason we're even getting stuck in this unproductive crap is that we're discussing this RJ plague in the context of another group that wants to step up to the plate, with even less accountability and transparency, and [deleted] the scope situation some more, while their attention is focused on whatever murky objectives they're actually after.

If anyone wants to clean up anything WRT scope (I'm not capitalizing, because, honestly, we don't have much in Section 1 that truly deserves the term "Scope Protection"), we actually have to show up at meetings, fill out surveys, and actually answer when Wilson calls that we are capable of overcoming our pathetic payrate bias, and build a contract that starts with us doing our flying, then has acceptable workrules and QOL, and uses payrates to tune the contract to current economics. Instead, we stupidly [oldest profession] every time, and go about every contract backwards, and cough up everything sacred in favor of the illusion of a good W2, no matter how much we have to [more oldest profession, on our knees] to get it.

Want better scope? Look in the mirror, then show up for a LEC meeting, and find like-minded people. It'll be easy, since there will only be two or three guys there. With any luck, the next time there would be four or five, and so on.