Union question
 

Newbie union question.

I’ve never been in a union before. As I understand it the primary things the union does that directly affects us individually are collective bargaining, contract administration, and grievance adjustment. At the same time I understand that these things are handled by committee members who are volunteer member pilots.

My question is, what do the dues pay for?

Thanks

Snacks…...

Hotels....

Pizza for new hires...

Some positions are paid. We also have some staff that works in the office.

This will get your fired up

https://www.unionfacts.com/employees/Air_Line_Pilots

Thanks for posting a link to a website run by a union busting front funded by corporate interests. In the words of Joe Hill, “there is power in a union.”

There is a reason that ALPA exists, and also factors that led to it not being set up along the lines of a traditional labor union. I recommend reading “Flying the Line,” for starters, when folks get time in order to get some notion of airline labor history.

Hahaha...so few will get this.

What We Do - ALPA


Your dues go to things like fighting the ME3, flags of convenience, lobbying for enhanced security, fighting to keep cameras out of cockpits, shutting down single pilot experiments in the cargo world which could bleed to the passenger world, and so much more.



And no, ALPA isn't blowing your money on "snacks" like in the past.

Don't confuse the ALPA PAC voluntary donations and regular dues. The later cannot pay for lobbyists and such.

The people lobbying for the PAC work for ALPA. The PAC money goes to individual politicians, but Tim and the boys at ALPA HQ are steering the ship.

Prior to coming to work for the airlines, I was a staunch anti union citizen. To some extent, I still am, especially labor unions that push for so much they drive the business out of the country. However, after seeing how this industry works, reading up on the past of it and looking to where it could be, I am 100% pro airline union now.

We would be up **** creek without them, especially when you look at the personality type of the average pilot and realize they can be impulsive, ungrateful and flat out wrong when it comes to managing their own destiny with an employer.

I will add that I dont think the union is always right or perfect, however they offer a nice checks and balance to pilot groups. I think the biggest issue people have with them is the time it takes to get anything done, but this is largely driven by the Railway Labor Act and market conditions.

Unions are labor’s counterbalance to the power of capital markets to squeeze every last penny out of a worker.

It’s about LEVERAGE: Labor vs Capital.
Which are you? (Hint: If you don’t own the company, you are labor.)

Come revisit this thread in a few years when the industry is in a downturn and pilots with careers families are being squeezed to the breaking point because shareholders are unhappy. They will take your pay and working conditions, that you took years to work for, and flush them down the tubes.

Come revisit this thread when a medical condition grounds you from your livelihood and your airline wants to pretend that it doesn’t even know who you are.

Come revisit this thread when you’ve had an accident or incident and the airline and NTSB are oh-too-eager to blame the mishap on “pilot error, (if you’re even alive to defend yourself.)

As for the comment, “I believe in airline unions but not other unions,” that is hypocrisy at its finest. Labor workers want the power of collective bargaining so that they can have a secure career for their families. Most other forces in the world would prefer to snuff that out, and apparently you do too.

Look at the US shipping industry from 1950 to 2000 to see how good jobs are lost to foreign markets when capital is allowed to break labor’s back - flags of convenience, outsourcing, automation. ALPA is the ONLY entity preventing that exact same pattern from occurring in the airline industry right now.

Most of what you said is correct, except you took me out of context. I said other labor unions that ask for so much they drive the business elsewhere or out of business. Look what our auto unions did, paying an assembly worker on a line $90 an hour for gods sake, to screw in some bolts. It was ridiculous and hurt everyone that wasn't the one directly benefiting.

Unions are good, as I said, they act as a checks and balance, but just like a company can get to strong, so can a union. Either side asking for too much is a bad thing.

So what if you’re both, as many of us probably are. Share holders aren’t just the Warren Buffet types you know. Your 401k probably has some AAG stock in it, which makes you an owner.

SkyWest seems to do okay, better than us crontractually I believe.

Is the information on that website incorrect? Or are we who are in some cases eligible for food stamps and Medicaid actually being forced to pay the 6 figure salaries of union fat cats that don’t do anything for us?

This is obviously not a serious question.

The union negotiates with the company on behalf of the pilots. For the average pilot, this is good and bad: on the one hand, solidarity among relatively hard-to-replace employees makes the company much more likely to listen. On the other, if you are not in a position to benefit from or on board with whatever the union is advocating (i.e. flow increases only for protected pilots), you are screwed.

For my part, I think that as long as things are as adversarial as they are between management & pilots, a union is a necessary inefficiency. To make a lasting change in this status quo, a company is going to have to lay down the sword, be nice to its people, and gain market-beating efficiency from it. Some people think Skywest is doing that.

Beyond that, lobbying will always be vital to prevent this career from falling apart, like so many others, to automation, outsourcing, cost cutting that affects safety etc.

Yes, this is a serious question. Read it again. The points you make are not relevant to the question posed.

To your last point, I personally am glad the buggy whip manufacturers didn’t have a union lobbying on their behalf.

The second and lasts paragraphs are the answer to your question. In your analogy, you are a buggy driver but you are welcome to advocate against your own interests if you want. You still have to pay the dues though.

The "union fat cats" line is exactly the sort of discourse that union busters want you to use. It is straight out of their playbook. If you don't believe me, take a look at how public sector union busting campaigns have played out over the last few years (Wisconsin is a great example).

Are there inefficiencies in unions? Sure. Does this negate the overall good that union solidarity brings in terms of work rules, wages, etc.? Nope. Go back to when ALPA was started in the 30's and you'll see owners bent on pushing their pilots in unsafe ways for minimal pay. This is the constant tension between management and labor that is, at least, tempered by unionism.

Your 1.5 shares mixed into your target date retirement fund really doesn't change the fact that you are labor and they want to squeeze you as much as possible. Your life is much more dramatically impacted by the work conditions and pay that are fought for by the union than by believing the meager shares you hold as a result of mutual fund make you an owner of the company. You are labor plain and simple and believe me when management knows that.

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires"

Think of union/company balance as a pendulum. Unions were created when business owners had all the power. Everything tilted to them and labor was exploited. When unions were created the power started to shift. What we want is for the pendulum to be balanced. Take away one of the forces and the power shifts completely. There will be periods of time where the power shifts too much in one direction, but just imagine what would happen when one of those forces disappear.

In a FREE economy (i.e. "capitalist"), elements of market forces (i.e. labor) are allowed to band together into "consortiums" to NEGOTIATE contracts governing how much compensation is owed for services rendered.

If you oppose the existence of worker unions, but are suspiciously content with the formation of corporate collective bargaining organizations (i.e. Regional Airline Association), you either don't know what you're talking about...or you're some kind of authoritarian monster.

That's all there is to it.

Skywest rides on the coat tails of the other union carriers, matching other carriers collectively bargained gains just enough to keep ALPA off the property. By the tone of your posts it seems you should have gone to work there.

Exactly this. SkyWest wasnt the ones negotiating industry leading pay. They only react to market forces. And if you want to claim well then if they are reacting to market forces that proves we don’t need unions and companies will do what’s right to attract talent, think again. The market forces are those gains brought about by ALPA and Teamsters at other carriers. Without those gains SKW would not have raised pay at all as no other carrier would have either. Notice how long it took them to react to Endevor and Republic anyways. They are just as reactive to issues as Envoy.

This is a false comparison by such a large degree, I am surprised you even mentioned them. You either dont know what you are talking about when it comes to Skywest or are just trying to fight the union mentality for the sake of it.

Skywest, up until recently didn't have the best of anything, other than perhaps FA's. They are doing well now because the UNION represented airlines, Envoy being the exception, fought and won large gains. Skywest needed to put up or shut up else lose the stream of pilots they need.

As another poster stated, the pendulum needs to be balanced, as to far to either side is bad.

:D :D :D

“Free economy (I.e. Capitalist)”

That’s comedic gold right there. Capitalism is the most anti-free economy to have existed, and it perpetuates itself on a fairy tale believed by its victims. Just as the landlords sold the enclosure movement to the people as for their own good, the moneyed and connected classes have constructed a system of exclusion, all the while telling you “freedom”. Barriers to entry, government enforcement of protection schemes and a centralized fiat currency benefit one class of people, and it sure as shoot ain’t labor.

Until wage slavery is ended and labor is free to compete on an open market to take its rightful place, unions are a necessary evil which only marginally rights the imbalance to labor that the capitalist structure has foisted upon it.

Millennial claptrap. Try living as a ****ing expat in a command economy nation; there's a reason the countries with the highest quality of life/purchasing power index are powered by market economies.

Corruptions like central banks, fiat currency, and corporatist elements within government aside (these are details that can be sorted intelligently), there is no CREDIBLE alternative that addresses the fundamental process of how resources/property are to be justly divided.

There is simply no empirical EVIDENCE for your exotic claim that capitalist economies are the "most anti-free to have ever existed," I'm afraid.

https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-li...jsp?title=2018

I will happily pay for your ticket to move to Venezuela. I'm sure you're willing to put your money where your mouth (keyboard) is. Your parents must be proud to know every penny of their hard-earned money spent on tuition at Evergreen, or wherever it is you went to "school", was squandered away. Hope you didn't take on any debt for the "professors" there who have never lived a life outside academia.

But who is John Galt?

You still clearly do not understand the original question.

People who doggedly and blindly defend unions certainly do get their panties in a wad pretty quickly. The first few replies seemed to have actually understood the question, then suddenly the discussion turned to people defending the need for our union and then quickly onto defending the idea of unions in general and how horrible the world would be without them.

Restated, the original question is, the important stuff is done by local volunteers, the lobbying stuff is done by a PAC not funded by dues, so what do the dues pay for? The question is not questioning the existence, need, or benefit of the union. The question is where does the money go? Is their a budget we can view? Is there an audit? Or do we give them millions of dollars each year and have no idea how it is spent?

Public school system drivel. The “corruptions” that you speak of are the core elements that make up capitalism. Do not mistake Capitalism for a free market, it is as centrally controlled as a Communist market, the planners simply refer to themselves as businessmen rather than beurocrats. The notion that capital creates value has no place in free markets nor in American economy, just ask Adam Smith the father of American economics who coined the labor theory of value, which rightfully identifies labor as the only value creator in practice.

Not that your reaction is all too surprising, as I said in my original post it is the very fairy tale that you are clinging to which keeps the capitalist class system in place, and your dependence on a union necessary.

If you care to venture outside of the neat little box that your public education has spoon fed you, there is a world out there that you haven’t even heard of before. Given your decidedly deep capitalist defense mechanisms I would suggest authors like Frederic Bastiat, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard and Hans Herman Hoppe to ease your transition, these won’t be as much of a shock to your system. If you’d like to jump in with eyes wide open you may prefer Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Lysander Spooner, Benjamin Tucker or Volatarine de Cleyre. If you’d like some more modern day authors Charles W. Johnson, Gary Chartier, Roderick T. Long and Kevin Carson are great contemporaries of the free market movement. If you prefer fiction Jean Baudrillards discussions of Simulacra through the mechanism of dystopian future science fiction that in fact tracks present day realities are quite good, an updated George Orwell if you will.

There are more than the two choices you have been presented, you should really use your faculties to discover all of the options rather than accepting what you are presented without question.

It is so sad what government education has done to generations of Americans.

That's a pretty slick summary of the situation. I was just WAITING for someone to come along and drop such a finely crafted synopsis of the thread; describing, in detail, PRECISELY how it "deviated" from what it was "meant" to be...

DAMN. Wow...dreams CAN come true...

Never go full retard.

You're confused, soultrain. "Public school system drivel" is a better descriptor for the millennial mewling you dropped a few posts back; idiot-American public education institutions are the "patient zero" for spreading the imbecilic propaganda that the PRESENT American economic system, with its incidental corruptions as they exist NOW, is the "most anti-free economy to have existed."

Your exotic claim is credulous hysteria. Even a CASUAL glance of the current global quality of life/purchasing power index FLATLY proves as much.

As I said: try living as an expat in a DEFINABLE command economy. Your particular species of alarmist nonsense only works on idiot-American provincials under the PROVABLE delusion they're living under the "most anti-free economy to have existed" because they haven't had to endure the authoritarian caprice of ACTUAL central planners in competing economic systems.

We're not talking about choices...do try and keep up. We're addressing your HILARIOUSLY exotic claims (i.e. "capitalism is most anti-free economy to have existed.").

Don’t worry, Rush and Hannity will tell you who to vote for. I wouldn’t want to be responsible for breaking what is clearly a very fragile mind.

Remind me again why you belong to a union? Clearly this robust and free capitalist market would reward you for your skill far more if you weren’t restrained by the forced mediocrity of collective bargaining, right?

What's it gonna cost me to get on Captain Dreadwing and FO FollowMe's jumpseat :D

Is it just me, or does anyone else thinks this was typed in word and the thesaurus function was used more than needed?