Correct. I was there (on my day off, unpaid) to support the picket. This post by Wuz is 100 percent fact, and I can back it up. Of course committee members have to be placed on FPL to do specific jobs, but thats public knowledge and the financials are always published on the alpa website.

Anyone who has done ALPA work knows that its more of an office job or regional manager position. The hours of trip pay don't correlate directly to the hours on the phone, spent in transit, spent in the lounges, and most of all spend doing the actual work of the members.

It is a salaried position where the salary is what you should have been paid based on your bid. To claim pay for any specific duty is ridiculous and directly accusatory. Falcon7 knows the nature of the FPL compensation model. Just because a trip that was bid fell on a day that was chosen by the management for a shareholder meeting, doesn't mean we are paying people to picket.

I don't know if you've read the bru-ha-ha on the Chit Chat board about the two Committee members who showed up to brief the MEC on the ME3, without their orange lanyard, but did those two guys join in the picket line?

How two -fired- former strategic planning committee members who were strong yes voters are still being paid FPL, refuse to wear the lanyard, and still on a committee is beyond me. Did they forget how to fly? :rolleyes:

I heard one of them forgot how to fly. So, his value to DAL is pushing managements agenda.

Change!? Yah right! These two clowns are proof that the old guard is still in power..Its all a smoke screen.

TEN

I disagree with that. They ARE however the snakes in the grass like Harwood... waiting. They should have disposed of them in a similar manner when they walked in the way they did, which was openly aggressive. Their motives are clear.

A couple of points:

1. The MEC and LEC leadership are doing the jobs we elected them to. They will be leading the picketing and I've absolutely no problem with them getting a 2 day trip drop.

2. The previous administration was a little too conservative with the spending, IMHO. A lot of committee work was done on pilots' own time and it burned them out. Dues refunds are popular with line pilots and those who handled the money enjoyed that popularity to the point of being a little unfair with the volunteers they tasked to do the work.

3. Pilot to Pilot was expensive and had questionable effectivity. It has been killed. It was led by one of the finest men and ALPA volunteers I've ever met, so this is not a criticism of his leadership, but rather we have evolved to a more social media centric age. P2P was a proving ground where most ALPA volunteers got their start and the administration got to know them. This minor league farm team is now gone and new volunteers are coming in at very high level positions. As a result there has been a lot of turn over. We have yet to see how this works over the long term, but some of John's picks have been terrific.

4. This administration is firing a lot lof ammo. Don't expect costs to go down. The mood seems to be that pilots are in agreement with the spending of dues for this purpose. But yes, there will probably be outrageous FPL as negotiations heat up and non-normal meetings are called on short notice. The pilots in some international categories have big trips - just the way it is.

4. Support your Chairman, Negotiators and Reps.

Those two were both also members of the infamous "Special Committee".

That committee and its budget was kept secret from the line pilots until the Kingsley Roberts recall meeting where its existence was revealed.
Those clowns blew through a huge chunk of our dues money doing nothing but political hatchet work. To this day I don't think we've seen a full accounting of how much that cost us.
Kingsley Roberts' efforts to get control of those guys was a big reason they removed him as MEC Chairman and put their guy Donatelli in power.

Except when the "Special Committee" needed some. They got whatever they wanted.