Say it again for those in back!

 

Lots of truth in this statement

 

While many here have said there was more on the table in RDU, remember the scenario. DAL got smacked by the arbitrator - er mediator, and at the same time the Railway workers got jammed by the GOVT so our side correctly read the tea leaves and took the deal. Was it perfect - no.

Thank you to the NC to finally getting us a meaningful #MeToo clause.

 

And again, let’s not forget that APA and UALPA were trying to bring much lower agreements to the table. I honestly think that our NC getting a deal and is getting the first deal signed helped us in this instance.

 

The APA did move the needle, once, and in the wrong direction!

In 1984 their pilot group offered their management a pay cut for all new hires, instead of the across the board pay cut their management was asking for.

I spoke with their then BOS base FE rep about this new “B Scale” just before I went to my first AA interview. He told me their logic was this; the company hadn’t hired anyone since 1981 when PATCO (Air traffic controllers) went on strike and were all fired by Ronald Regan. All the Majors canceled flights and started furloughing pilots, except Delta, which is why the employees bought the first 767, now on display in the Delta Museum.

I was flying part 135 at the time, cancelled checks 4 nights a week, and one of my copilots was a furloughed AA pilot, hired in 1979, furloughed in 1981, who later took a job with BOS tower reading my my clearance, until he was recalled in 1984.

So…AA was in contract negotiations starting in 1982 and told the APA they wanted to hire “thousands of pilots” but they couldn’t afford to at their pay rates because of the lost revenue from the PATCO strike, so the company wanted an across the board pay cut of like 7%. Well according to the BOS FE rep I spoke to, the APA didn’t believe AA was going to hire thousands of pilots, and they’d had hundreds on furlough since 1981, so the APA said to management, “If you’re going to hire thousands, then pay them LESS, because we have given ENOUGH, and we are NOT taking a pay cut!”

So the B Scale was born. All “new hire” pilots at AA starting in September 1984 were paid much less than their A Scale pilots.

OK….so what happened next? How did the AA B Scale proliferate to all the ALPA carriers??

ALPA in their brilliance of Monkey See, Monkey Do negotiating strategy (pattern bargaining) bowed (bent over!) to all the other Majors management’s, demanding a B Scale because; We need to Be Competitive With American!”

So yeah, APA moved the needle, in the WRONG direction!

Why ALPA National didn’t tell all the other management teams to pound sand is beyond me, but I got to enjoy 5 years of 30% reduced earnings from September 1985-1990.

Don’t even get me started on how ALPA allowed our narrow body flying to be outsourced to RJs, throughout the 1990s- to today, and our International wide body flying to be outsourced to our 21 JV partners…

 

Great job my ours and United’s NC.
Regarding your last paragraph you so right about the RJ flying. I was looking 2 union reps in the face, Roscoe Macmillan and Rick Columbia when they responded to a question as to why the RJ’s could not be made delta metal. “We don’t want small aircraft at delta” was the response. 601 furloughed pilots later we all saw the error in this line of thinking.

 

Timbo....good synopsis and to add, it was a 17 YEAR B-scale at AA. Ouch.

Boatbuilder....the RJ flying was a double edged sword. Delta was about 80% military hiring in that era. There is no way in h*ll any military pilot would have applied to Delta and been behind ALL the newly minted 24 year old "Delta" pilots being stapled to the bottom of the list. Where was the money(negotiating capital) going to be paid from to bring all these new in house RJ pilot salary/benefits up to Delta pilot standard? It was going to come at somebody else's expense(current Delta pilots). Additionally, seems like the most b*thched about QOL flying is the "RJ-style" of flying . I'm not defending what happened, just trying to add perspective of what transpired 40 years ago without the insight of Monday morning quarterbacking.

I believe, there weren't any limits on Delta having the capacity to have "subsidiaries" fly Delta pax for connections to Delta metal. Sailingfun could probably add more insight. Therefore, it would have required a lot of negotiating capital to negotiate limits on the RJ's. I believe Timbo was in the small minority of young civilian pilots and views this from that perspective. I am not so sure that represents the vast majority of Delta pilots waaay back then. (Just my perspective as a 32 yo ex-military pilot being hired at Delta)

 

give kid a little slack
he is probably enjoying life not being a slave to electronics. Better for your neck plus there are always guys willing to catch you up

 

This! Plus Cunningham's law is always a safe bet.

 

Ironically, AA pilots hired in 1984 were widebody CAs in about six years. Good timing for them and proof being at the front of a hiring wave is paramount to everything in this biz(I know not related to the topic- just an interesting fact).