The company hired you and the company can fire you... and the APA gets to F you... Bless the company (at least pretend when they are looking). :D

The knuckle headed APA is now calling on pilots to refuse scheduling assignments that are (in the opinion of the APA) contrary to the contract.

UnFing believable... The APA couldn't fight against the membership fast enough and hard enough to pass the JCBA immediately at the behest of management (contrary to all common sense in the most insane profit period of airline history)... The APA couldn't muster a whimper of protest in the easiest of negotiating environments, but now they want individuals to buck the company and offer the chief pilot a middle finger?

Where to H will the APA be when the chief pilot fires you? The APA will be busy eating at another expensed obscenely lavish dinner.

The benefit of a union is disputable, at best--especially the white collar management wannabe pilot unions. The day the free market allows paying as much or as little as one wants to a union is the day the unions will actually have to perform for their members rather than the self-important leaches calling themselves leaders.

Oh the irony.. a union having to leverage the ideals of capitalism to survive. :D

The "union" has nothing sacred except preserving and expanding the dues stream to pay for flight pay loss and lavish dinners. The mere membership is expendable to that end.


The impossibility of a union's success should be evident from its premise. Perpetual dissatisfaction is the fortuitous and necessary impetus that lays the membership ripe for exploitation, even as they feel empowered to improve upon the company that is in fact in collusion with a minority of pilots that are pacifying the masses by feigning a fight.

Its quite symbiotic. The masses are entertained, distracted, or pacified in their "battle". The equivocators become rich and live in houses they can't afford apart from the symbiotic assistance... Chicago mortgages are expensive. :D

Yep.

Yep....again.

Three for three!

It's funny, you didn't see what I was getting at before but now (and I know you still don't like me) after the MOU and the JCBA getting voted in I think you get my point. The union is there for show only.

We have to get paid, but having "two masters" is at best a joke. Keep the money, I say. Then you can buy your "lavish" dinners.

The dinner was a terrible lapse in judgment. I agree. But we can find a way to become a formidable block that the company cannot manipulate into doing their own bidding. I do not see how you can believe that we are better off fighting corporate conglomerates as individuals.

Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with the APA Constitution & Bylaws. The portions dictating the process of negotiations are simply a work of art. But most everyone was unwilling to follow the CB&L

The problem is the company worked overtime to dislodge the BOD from their Constitutional process of negotiations... Uh, I mean the National officers of APA worked overtime in collaboration with the Company to seperate the BOD from the Costitutional process... Hell, the Negotiaing Chairman was right there with the National Officers. And on the second front we had a large number of short sighted individualists on the BOD that did their best to seperate the membership from the BOD members that were on the right track. (Something about ORD mortgages). In that environment it was easy for a sweeping majority of membership to be caught like monkeys with their hand in the proverbial monkey trap, unable to rationally think while their hand was seized upon the ParkirbyGlass bait, the CB&L forgotten or reviled.

The pilot union experiment has now concluded. There will never be a more opportune time to negotiate with management. Never.

If leaders and members will not read their own Costitution, much less follow it (or worse, actually flout it) then by definition they are the ones who are anti Union.

That has been my contention.

Because we CAN'T fight them together. Everyone has a different idea about seniority. I am NOT going to be part of a union that puts "scab" in their Constitution. Any group like the APA, ALPA or the West that strips their fellow pilots of their time in service is NOT. A union member and anyone who believes otherwise strips the meaning of unionism from the rank and file.

Gotta go.

So why not start now. Let the past go. "Bygones".... Everybody say it with me. Come up with a standard and stick with it.

Trust is a funny thing in that once violated the chances of ever regaining it are slim to none. That ship sailed back in 08 now we have hatred and disgust that will linger on until people are made whole and since the chances of that are even slimmer I will go so far as to say that it will be here until 2030.

WD at AWA