Originally Posted by Bucking Bar (Post 644589)

Sailing,

What you and our MEC overlook is that "Delta, Inc." did not furlough. In fact, Delta hired more pilots from 2000 to 2005 than it has in any other time in its history. Delta Connection carriers hired about three pilots for every Delta pilot furloughed and in many cases, furloughed Delta pilots found work at the DCI carriers that replaced them. No one could have conceived that the regional pilots would outnumber the mainline pilots in ALPA, but today that is nearly true, even though roughly half the DCI pilots are not in ALPA.

When a mainline job is replaced by a regional job, that IS A FAILURE OF SCOPE! When a union job is replaced by non union workers, THAT IS A FAILURE of scope. We have seen entry level Delta jobs vanish as Delta made a huge investment in new equipment. Over 11 billion dollars was spent replacing 727's, and 737-200's with Regional Jets, replacing Express and Shuttle with Comair and well, Shuttle, flown by Teamsters pilots.

Lets look at the genesis of that logic:
When our union's President starts to sound like United CEO Glenn Tilton, I start to get concerned....

I have had a long talk with these same people. It ends, in every case, with their admission that they have not updated their economic analysis since the concessionary negotiations in bankruptcy. They say that it is not just pilot costs, but also the cost of aircraft support, under wing baggage handling, gate agents and maintenance. Their argument overlooks the fact that Delta has consolidated most of these functions into Delta Regional Handling and Delta mainline (in the case of ASA) to save money establish control and be more efficient.

Besides, if their argument is true, why did we merge Delta and Northwest?

Aside from cost, there are additional revenue possibilities by operating 90 seat jets at mainline with 90 seats in them, as opposed to 76 seats. The sale of 14 additional seats has to be worth more than it would cost to pay an entry level Delta pilot for that work.Here, we agree. I do not advocate throwing out our MEC to replace them with a more radical version of the same thing.

We also agree that change is needed.

We MUST return to our core beliefs as a union. We will find power in unity and it is our best argument at the negotiating table. Rather than finding reasons why it is best to have a separate DCI, we need to be looking for ways to facilitate Delta pilots performing Delta flying.

This outsourcing started all the way back at Randy Babbitt, who now ironically is the head of a FAA Administration being lambasted for their regulation of a regional airline where training expenses had been stripped to the absolute core to make possible the vision of costs "a country mile lower" than ours. Mr. Babbitt has repeatedly said it was a mistake and that ALPA should have found a way to make this flying work at mainline. If Mr. Babbitt eventually saw the light, I hope the current generation in power can also come to this realization.

For starters, we need new numbers. As was resolved in Council 44, we need economic analysis of the benefits of unity. As you know, the MEC resolved by acclimation NOT to STUDY unity.

How do we deal with that? I dunno, you got any ideas?

Originally Posted by Nosmo King (Post 644664)

Have a beer on me, good post. :)

Originally Posted by forgot to bid (Post 644666)

Bar's en fuego! :)

Keep it up man!

Originally Posted by Bucking Bar (Post 644687)

Anybody else think this is just funnier than all heck?

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Originally Posted by Bucking Bar (Post 644687)

Anybody else think this is just funnier than all heck?

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Originally Posted by forgot to bid (Post 644716)

Back to scope...

Originally Posted by forgot to bid (Post 644711)

Flyasa, dude that was a bit of a buzz kill.

Since the humor is gone let me say this; sometimes the previous generation is called greedy and whether that's right or wrong is irrelevant to me but I find it ironic that FAs that had no problem with age and size limits when they were hired ended up fighting so hard ending age and size limits. And now what do we have? Attack of the killer tomatoes, passengers possibly mistaking red dresses for life rafts, airplanes who probably wouldn't really stop in time on a v1 rto and so on. All because of a greedy few that didn't want the rules to apply to them. Sad.