Originally Posted by
georgetg
The way I understand it there were some key players that were involved in all of them.
The AS agreement was modified to account for the NW AS agreement. IOW the Section 1 was in fact modified when DAL and NW merged...
I agree that most of these things are in place now with little room for remedies. That's why it is so important to understand and learn from the mistakes and the successes. Something that's not possible if one doesn't allow for criticism of sections that are lacking.
If we want to avoid past mistakes we need to acknowledge them, study them and ensure they don't happen again.
or
we just don't admit to mistakes and continue...
Cheers
George
Sure. You bring up a good point, which is that the AS agreement could not be simply inherited without our approval. This doesn't mean Alaska had to agree to go along with new terms, but they had something to gain from the bigger network. On the other hand, I think the truth is that both MEC's, and both companies, really did want this merger. I think it came down to time, and we would have had to be amazingly unified and forward-thinking to get what we got plus contractual modifications. For starters, we would have had to agreee on what both groups would have wanted in a combined contract.
Now that we have time, I'd really like us to craft the contract the Delta pilots will work under, not to blindly head towards a TA. To me, the cornerstones would be be capturing as much of our flying as possible, a review of benefits, a redesign of Section 23, better DC rates, and, finally, tweaking payrates to get to the overall cost we can negotiate.