FedEx to DHL
06-28-2023 | 01:40 PM
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FedEx to DHL
Just forwarded to me:
Scope DHL
“This is going to be long, and is by no means a complete tale of the events, but it's important to understand the basics. The pilots at FedEx are in great danger of falling down the same path as the DHL pilots.
I'll try to summarize this whole saga. DHL was an American company. The airline was DHL Airways which was 100 percent owned by DHL, much the way AMR corporation owns American Airlines or the way FedEx Corporation owns FedEx Express.
At DHL Airways the callsign was DHL, it said DHL on our uniforms, ID badges, paychecks and our contract. We were DHL pilots to the same extent that pilots for FedEx Express are FedEx pilots. We had a scope clause that tied us to any DHL freight flown in the United States with the usual types of exceptions. It was a very strong scope clause.
When the contract with that scope clause was signed, I have been told by numerous pilots who were there, that Art Luby said it was the strongest scope clause in the industry. I believe he did say that and it's going to matter later in the story.
Then Deutsche Post purchased DHL outright from the owner. Keep in mind that the original founders were all dead at this point. Well Dalsey and Lynn were dead, Hillblom disappeared and is presumed dead.
Of course there is a problem here. Deutsche Post is a German company and under U.S. Law they can't own more than 49% of a US Airline. The solution was to sell 51% of DHL Airways to John Dasburg the former CEO of Northwest Airlines and later Burger King. Deutsche Post sought him out and sold the airline to him for a pittance compared to what the ACMI contract was going to bring in. At the time we didn't understand why DHL wanted Dasburg specifically, but we would eventually find out.
Then 51/49 ownership of DHL Airways meant that it was now an ACMI carrier with an ACMI contract with DHL. This does not invalidate the scope clause but DHL started acting as if it did. The scope clause tied the pilots on the seniority list to DHL freight regardless of who owned what.
Next, UPS and FedEx sued the govt. for allowing DHL Airways to operate. Their argument was that they (meaning UPS and FedEx) were required by the govt to have their own airlines, but that DHL, now a foreign company was exerting operational control over DHL Airways which should have been illegal. They were right of course. DHL decided where the planes go, what they carry, how much fuel to put on and what alternates would be best if the freight couldn't make it to it's primary destination. Their case was rock solid. DHL was foreign owned and although they only owned 49 percent on paper they had 100 percent operational control of the airline.
It looked as if UPS and FedEx would win, but then before he could deliver a verdict the judge was thrown off the case for Xenophobia, which is an unreasonable fear of foreigners. G.W. Bush was president and this time, and his brother Jeb Bush was gov. of Florida and close friends with Dasburg. It's about this time we realized that Dasburg was probably sought out by Deutsche Post for his political connections more than anything else.
During or around this time our contract negotiations were stalled out. DHL filed a lawsuit against our pilot group for “unfair labor practicesâ€. The unfair practice they accused us of was essentially just having a scope clause. The idea here was that by filling suit first they could choose a location that would be friendly to them, and this worked to an extent, primarily in running the clock and wearing down the pilot group.
The scope fight was going to be very long and expensive, and if we lost it was going to be a large blow to ALPA. As the fight progressed eventually it started to move in our direction, but this took years and is a discussion all it's own. The short version is that once the scope fight started to go in the right direction, all of the sudden we were offered a contract. This contract had a minor pay raise and essentially eliminated our scope clause.
Now at this point DHL had been subcontracting a lot of other carriers to fly the freight and was not in compliance with our contract. It was blatantly obvious that they wanted to get rid of scope in order to replace us without having any legal problems. You would think in that environment management would have an impossible time convincing pilots to vote for their own demise. However they had an Ace up their sleeve, and that was Alpa's contract administration lawyer Art Luby.
Art Luby is the guy who convinced the DHL Airways pilot group to get rid of scope. Ironically he is the same guy who had said years earlier that this was the strongest scope clause in the business, although at this point he denied he ever said that, and I was in the room when he was challenged on this.
I need to add that by this point the name of DHL Airways had been changed to Astar. With 20/20 hindsight we can see that the obvious reason for doing that was to prevent the DHL brand name from being tarnished when the airline was shut down. Nobody knows who Astar Air Cargo was. This was done by John Dasburg who gave an entirely different reason for doing it, but it's now clear why he did it. For continuity I'll be calling the airline DHL Airways.
Back to Art Luby, he claimed that our jobs would be safe without scope. He now claimed that scope was of no value, but that the job protection covenants he put in the next contract would give us the job security we wanted.
These covenants including promises of increasing the fleet size and adding more modern and newer airplanes to the fleet. There were liquidated damages to be paid to the pilot group if these things didn't come to fruition. Job security was provided by a clause that said the company couldn't furlough pilots unless the freight volume dropped by about 80 percent for some period of time, I think it was 60 days or something like that.
I was talking with everyone I could saying that this contract was a bad idea and that we shouldn't give up scope. The argument I ran into most often was this. “Art Luby is our contract administration lawyer and he says we should sign itâ€. First of all that's an argument from authority, which makes it invalid to start with but the even bigger problem is that it's based a a fatal premise.
You see, Art Luby was not our lawyer, and he isn't yours either. He is ALPA's contract administration lawyer. If your pilot groups interests do not align with ALPA national's, then he will be working against you. I'm not saying that's what's happening here but it's critical to understand that he is NOT your lawyer.
Now Art Luby is an incredible person. He is highly intelligent, an excellent speaker and has a lot of charisma. If you meet him in person, you almost can't help but to like the guy, and you will probably want him to like you. I know a lot of of people who were fooled by this. You have to judge the contract by what it says, NOT buy what Art Luby tells you it says.
The Union held meetings, both the in person road show format as well as call in meetings for those who couldn't attend in person. I went to both types. On one call in I pointed out that DHL could get rid of us by simply lowering the volume of cargo for the prescribed period of time. Art Luby suggested that because I couldn't explain how they would go about this that the idea was preposterous, that DHL couldn't possibly lower the volume that much. Of course it turned out Art Luby was 100 percent wrong, once the new contract was signed, within about two or three months DHL put into action a plan to lower the volume by the needed amount and of course it worked.
Back to those job protection covenants. The argument against the value of scope that I heard a lot was that if the airline closes down, then scope is of no value anyway. The example people would often cite was from Eastern Airlines (the original one). They pointed out that the Eastern pilots got next to nothing when the airline closed down and they had scope.
First of all, I don't know what the Eastern guys had in their contract, but that's another situation entirely. Eastern is gone. DHL is NOT gone. DHL Airways is gone because they closed it down, but DHL is not gone. I see their logo on trucks and planes every day it's a strong reminder not to give up scope.
By eliminating scope they can kill off the airline but keep the business going. This is where those job protection covenants will utterly fail you. Once they shut down the airline they don't have to increase the fleet size or do anything. I never got one cent from those covenants, nobody did. Now we did get a deal where we got paid for a few months after we were let go, but that was about all.
The job protection covenants Art Luby will try to sell you on are worthless and he has to know that because they failed utterly when he sold this to the DHL pilot group. I don't know what Art Luby's intentions are, but this doesn't look good to me.
The only reason FedEx has for wanting to get rid of scope is so that they can follow the DHL and Amazon model of using ACMI carriers to take advantage of the much lower cost labor. There is no other way to look at this. If the FedEx pilots give up scope they will know within 12 months that it was a mistake, probably sooner.
I think this has been in the works for a long time. I had always wondered why UPS and FedEx didn't try again with that lawsuit regarding DHL exerting operational control on a US airline. Clearly they could have gone at it again with another judge. I think now we know why they didn't. They realized that if they just let things play out it will establish a precedent that they can exploit for themselves and now they want to cash in on it.
Not only has precedent been set, but the time is right to throw this at the pilot group. In the next five years over 20 percent of their pilot group will be retiring. That's 20 percent that don't need to worry about scope and will likely be very willing to sacrifice it for some small improvement to retirement. So it's easy to get their votes. Then you have another section of the pilot group, and these are usually ones that come from backgrounds where they were able to trust their leadership to at least be on the same team. It typically takes these folks 5 to 10 years to realize they are being lied to, so they can be trusted to drink the Kool Aid and vote as they are told. The way I see the numbers, these two blocks stack the deck in favor of those trying to get rid of scope.
I hope I'm wrong, but I think Art Luby is about to help management destroy another pilot group.â€
Scope DHL
“This is going to be long, and is by no means a complete tale of the events, but it's important to understand the basics. The pilots at FedEx are in great danger of falling down the same path as the DHL pilots.
I'll try to summarize this whole saga. DHL was an American company. The airline was DHL Airways which was 100 percent owned by DHL, much the way AMR corporation owns American Airlines or the way FedEx Corporation owns FedEx Express.
At DHL Airways the callsign was DHL, it said DHL on our uniforms, ID badges, paychecks and our contract. We were DHL pilots to the same extent that pilots for FedEx Express are FedEx pilots. We had a scope clause that tied us to any DHL freight flown in the United States with the usual types of exceptions. It was a very strong scope clause.
When the contract with that scope clause was signed, I have been told by numerous pilots who were there, that Art Luby said it was the strongest scope clause in the industry. I believe he did say that and it's going to matter later in the story.
Then Deutsche Post purchased DHL outright from the owner. Keep in mind that the original founders were all dead at this point. Well Dalsey and Lynn were dead, Hillblom disappeared and is presumed dead.
Of course there is a problem here. Deutsche Post is a German company and under U.S. Law they can't own more than 49% of a US Airline. The solution was to sell 51% of DHL Airways to John Dasburg the former CEO of Northwest Airlines and later Burger King. Deutsche Post sought him out and sold the airline to him for a pittance compared to what the ACMI contract was going to bring in. At the time we didn't understand why DHL wanted Dasburg specifically, but we would eventually find out.
Then 51/49 ownership of DHL Airways meant that it was now an ACMI carrier with an ACMI contract with DHL. This does not invalidate the scope clause but DHL started acting as if it did. The scope clause tied the pilots on the seniority list to DHL freight regardless of who owned what.
Next, UPS and FedEx sued the govt. for allowing DHL Airways to operate. Their argument was that they (meaning UPS and FedEx) were required by the govt to have their own airlines, but that DHL, now a foreign company was exerting operational control over DHL Airways which should have been illegal. They were right of course. DHL decided where the planes go, what they carry, how much fuel to put on and what alternates would be best if the freight couldn't make it to it's primary destination. Their case was rock solid. DHL was foreign owned and although they only owned 49 percent on paper they had 100 percent operational control of the airline.
It looked as if UPS and FedEx would win, but then before he could deliver a verdict the judge was thrown off the case for Xenophobia, which is an unreasonable fear of foreigners. G.W. Bush was president and this time, and his brother Jeb Bush was gov. of Florida and close friends with Dasburg. It's about this time we realized that Dasburg was probably sought out by Deutsche Post for his political connections more than anything else.
During or around this time our contract negotiations were stalled out. DHL filed a lawsuit against our pilot group for “unfair labor practicesâ€. The unfair practice they accused us of was essentially just having a scope clause. The idea here was that by filling suit first they could choose a location that would be friendly to them, and this worked to an extent, primarily in running the clock and wearing down the pilot group.
The scope fight was going to be very long and expensive, and if we lost it was going to be a large blow to ALPA. As the fight progressed eventually it started to move in our direction, but this took years and is a discussion all it's own. The short version is that once the scope fight started to go in the right direction, all of the sudden we were offered a contract. This contract had a minor pay raise and essentially eliminated our scope clause.
Now at this point DHL had been subcontracting a lot of other carriers to fly the freight and was not in compliance with our contract. It was blatantly obvious that they wanted to get rid of scope in order to replace us without having any legal problems. You would think in that environment management would have an impossible time convincing pilots to vote for their own demise. However they had an Ace up their sleeve, and that was Alpa's contract administration lawyer Art Luby.
Art Luby is the guy who convinced the DHL Airways pilot group to get rid of scope. Ironically he is the same guy who had said years earlier that this was the strongest scope clause in the business, although at this point he denied he ever said that, and I was in the room when he was challenged on this.
I need to add that by this point the name of DHL Airways had been changed to Astar. With 20/20 hindsight we can see that the obvious reason for doing that was to prevent the DHL brand name from being tarnished when the airline was shut down. Nobody knows who Astar Air Cargo was. This was done by John Dasburg who gave an entirely different reason for doing it, but it's now clear why he did it. For continuity I'll be calling the airline DHL Airways.
Back to Art Luby, he claimed that our jobs would be safe without scope. He now claimed that scope was of no value, but that the job protection covenants he put in the next contract would give us the job security we wanted.
These covenants including promises of increasing the fleet size and adding more modern and newer airplanes to the fleet. There were liquidated damages to be paid to the pilot group if these things didn't come to fruition. Job security was provided by a clause that said the company couldn't furlough pilots unless the freight volume dropped by about 80 percent for some period of time, I think it was 60 days or something like that.
I was talking with everyone I could saying that this contract was a bad idea and that we shouldn't give up scope. The argument I ran into most often was this. “Art Luby is our contract administration lawyer and he says we should sign itâ€. First of all that's an argument from authority, which makes it invalid to start with but the even bigger problem is that it's based a a fatal premise.
You see, Art Luby was not our lawyer, and he isn't yours either. He is ALPA's contract administration lawyer. If your pilot groups interests do not align with ALPA national's, then he will be working against you. I'm not saying that's what's happening here but it's critical to understand that he is NOT your lawyer.
Now Art Luby is an incredible person. He is highly intelligent, an excellent speaker and has a lot of charisma. If you meet him in person, you almost can't help but to like the guy, and you will probably want him to like you. I know a lot of of people who were fooled by this. You have to judge the contract by what it says, NOT buy what Art Luby tells you it says.
The Union held meetings, both the in person road show format as well as call in meetings for those who couldn't attend in person. I went to both types. On one call in I pointed out that DHL could get rid of us by simply lowering the volume of cargo for the prescribed period of time. Art Luby suggested that because I couldn't explain how they would go about this that the idea was preposterous, that DHL couldn't possibly lower the volume that much. Of course it turned out Art Luby was 100 percent wrong, once the new contract was signed, within about two or three months DHL put into action a plan to lower the volume by the needed amount and of course it worked.
Back to those job protection covenants. The argument against the value of scope that I heard a lot was that if the airline closes down, then scope is of no value anyway. The example people would often cite was from Eastern Airlines (the original one). They pointed out that the Eastern pilots got next to nothing when the airline closed down and they had scope.
First of all, I don't know what the Eastern guys had in their contract, but that's another situation entirely. Eastern is gone. DHL is NOT gone. DHL Airways is gone because they closed it down, but DHL is not gone. I see their logo on trucks and planes every day it's a strong reminder not to give up scope.
By eliminating scope they can kill off the airline but keep the business going. This is where those job protection covenants will utterly fail you. Once they shut down the airline they don't have to increase the fleet size or do anything. I never got one cent from those covenants, nobody did. Now we did get a deal where we got paid for a few months after we were let go, but that was about all.
The job protection covenants Art Luby will try to sell you on are worthless and he has to know that because they failed utterly when he sold this to the DHL pilot group. I don't know what Art Luby's intentions are, but this doesn't look good to me.
The only reason FedEx has for wanting to get rid of scope is so that they can follow the DHL and Amazon model of using ACMI carriers to take advantage of the much lower cost labor. There is no other way to look at this. If the FedEx pilots give up scope they will know within 12 months that it was a mistake, probably sooner.
I think this has been in the works for a long time. I had always wondered why UPS and FedEx didn't try again with that lawsuit regarding DHL exerting operational control on a US airline. Clearly they could have gone at it again with another judge. I think now we know why they didn't. They realized that if they just let things play out it will establish a precedent that they can exploit for themselves and now they want to cash in on it.
Not only has precedent been set, but the time is right to throw this at the pilot group. In the next five years over 20 percent of their pilot group will be retiring. That's 20 percent that don't need to worry about scope and will likely be very willing to sacrifice it for some small improvement to retirement. So it's easy to get their votes. Then you have another section of the pilot group, and these are usually ones that come from backgrounds where they were able to trust their leadership to at least be on the same team. It typically takes these folks 5 to 10 years to realize they are being lied to, so they can be trusted to drink the Kool Aid and vote as they are told. The way I see the numbers, these two blocks stack the deck in favor of those trying to get rid of scope.
I hope I'm wrong, but I think Art Luby is about to help management destroy another pilot group.â€
06-28-2023 | 02:36 PM
#2
Line Holder
Joined: Mar 2012
Posts: 1,188
Likes: 3
From: Two Wheeler FrontSeat
Just forwarded to me:
Scope DHL
âThis is going to be long, and is by no means a complete tale of the events, but it's important to understand the basics. The pilots at FedEx are in great danger of falling down the same path as the DHL pilots.
I'll try to summarize this whole saga. DHL was an American company. The airline was DHL Airways which was 100 percent owned by DHL, much the way AMR corporation owns American Airlines or the way FedEx Corporation owns FedEx Express.
At DHL Airways the callsign was DHL, it said DHL on our uniforms, ID badges, paychecks and our contract. We were DHL pilots to the same extent that pilots for FedEx Express are FedEx pilots. We had a scope clause that tied us to any DHL freight flown in the United States with the usual types of exceptions. It was a very strong scope clause.
When the contract with that scope clause was signed, I have been told by numerous pilots who were there, that Art Luby said it was the strongest scope clause in the industry. I believe he did say that and it's going to matter later in the story.
Then Deutsche Post purchased DHL outright from the owner. Keep in mind that the original founders were all dead at this point. Well Dalsey and Lynn were dead, Hillblom disappeared and is presumed dead.
Of course there is a problem here. Deutsche Post is a German company and under U.S. Law they can't own more than 49% of a US Airline. The solution was to sell 51% of DHL Airways to John Dasburg the former CEO of Northwest Airlines and later Burger King. Deutsche Post sought him out and sold the airline to him for a pittance compared to what the ACMI contract was going to bring in. At the time we didn't understand why DHL wanted Dasburg specifically, but we would eventually find out.
Then 51/49 ownership of DHL Airways meant that it was now an ACMI carrier with an ACMI contract with DHL. This does not invalidate the scope clause but DHL started acting as if it did. The scope clause tied the pilots on the seniority list to DHL freight regardless of who owned what.
Next, UPS and FedEx sued the govt. for allowing DHL Airways to operate. Their argument was that they (meaning UPS and FedEx) were required by the govt to have their own airlines, but that DHL, now a foreign company was exerting operational control over DHL Airways which should have been illegal. They were right of course. DHL decided where the planes go, what they carry, how much fuel to put on and what alternates would be best if the freight couldn't make it to it's primary destination. Their case was rock solid. DHL was foreign owned and although they only owned 49 percent on paper they had 100 percent operational control of the airline.
It looked as if UPS and FedEx would win, but then before he could deliver a verdict the judge was thrown off the case for Xenophobia, which is an unreasonable fear of foreigners. G.W. Bush was president and this time, and his brother Jeb Bush was gov. of Florida and close friends with Dasburg. It's about this time we realized that Dasburg was probably sought out by Deutsche Post for his political connections more than anything else.
During or around this time our contract negotiations were stalled out. DHL filed a lawsuit against our pilot group for âunfair labor practicesâ. The unfair practice they accused us of was essentially just having a scope clause. The idea here was that by filling suit first they could choose a location that would be friendly to them, and this worked to an extent, primarily in running the clock and wearing down the pilot group.
The scope fight was going to be very long and expensive, and if we lost it was going to be a large blow to ALPA. As the fight progressed eventually it started to move in our direction, but this took years and is a discussion all it's own. The short version is that once the scope fight started to go in the right direction, all of the sudden we were offered a contract. This contract had a minor pay raise and essentially eliminated our scope clause.
Now at this point DHL had been subcontracting a lot of other carriers to fly the freight and was not in compliance with our contract. It was blatantly obvious that they wanted to get rid of scope in order to replace us without having any legal problems. You would think in that environment management would have an impossible time convincing pilots to vote for their own demise. However they had an Ace up their sleeve, and that was Alpa's contract administration lawyer Art Luby.
Art Luby is the guy who convinced the DHL Airways pilot group to get rid of scope. Ironically he is the same guy who had said years earlier that this was the strongest scope clause in the business, although at this point he denied he ever said that, and I was in the room when he was challenged on this.
I need to add that by this point the name of DHL Airways had been changed to Astar. With 20/20 hindsight we can see that the obvious reason for doing that was to prevent the DHL brand name from being tarnished when the airline was shut down. Nobody knows who Astar Air Cargo was. This was done by John Dasburg who gave an entirely different reason for doing it, but it's now clear why he did it. For continuity I'll be calling the airline DHL Airways.
Back to Art Luby, he claimed that our jobs would be safe without scope. He now claimed that scope was of no value, but that the job protection covenants he put in the next contract would give us the job security we wanted.
These covenants including promises of increasing the fleet size and adding more modern and newer airplanes to the fleet. There were liquidated damages to be paid to the pilot group if these things didn't come to fruition. Job security was provided by a clause that said the company couldn't furlough pilots unless the freight volume dropped by about 80 percent for some period of time, I think it was 60 days or something like that.
I was talking with everyone I could saying that this contract was a bad idea and that we shouldn't give up scope. The argument I ran into most often was this. âArt Luby is our contract administration lawyer and he says we should sign itâ. First of all that's an argument from authority, which makes it invalid to start with but the even bigger problem is that it's based a a fatal premise.
You see, Art Luby was not our lawyer, and he isn't yours either. He is ALPA's contract administration lawyer. If your pilot groups interests do not align with ALPA national's, then he will be working against you. I'm not saying that's what's happening here but it's critical to understand that he is NOT your lawyer.
Now Art Luby is an incredible person. He is highly intelligent, an excellent speaker and has a lot of charisma. If you meet him in person, you almost can't help but to like the guy, and you will probably want him to like you. I know a lot of of people who were fooled by this. You have to judge the contract by what it says, NOT buy what Art Luby tells you it says.
The Union held meetings, both the in person road show format as well as call in meetings for those who couldn't attend in person. I went to both types. On one call in I pointed out that DHL could get rid of us by simply lowering the volume of cargo for the prescribed period of time. Art Luby suggested that because I couldn't explain how they would go about this that the idea was preposterous, that DHL couldn't possibly lower the volume that much. Of course it turned out Art Luby was 100 percent wrong, once the new contract was signed, within about two or three months DHL put into action a plan to lower the volume by the needed amount and of course it worked.
Back to those job protection covenants. The argument against the value of scope that I heard a lot was that if the airline closes down, then scope is of no value anyway. The example people would often cite was from Eastern Airlines (the original one). They pointed out that the Eastern pilots got next to nothing when the airline closed down and they had scope.
First of all, I don't know what the Eastern guys had in their contract, but that's another situation entirely. Eastern is gone. DHL is NOT gone. DHL Airways is gone because they closed it down, but DHL is not gone. I see their logo on trucks and planes every day it's a strong reminder not to give up scope.
By eliminating scope they can kill off the airline but keep the business going. This is where those job protection covenants will utterly fail you. Once they shut down the airline they don't have to increase the fleet size or do anything. I never got one cent from those covenants, nobody did. Now we did get a deal where we got paid for a few months after we were let go, but that was about all.
The job protection covenants Art Luby will try to sell you on are worthless and he has to know that because they failed utterly when he sold this to the DHL pilot group. I don't know what Art Luby's intentions are, but this doesn't look good to me.
The only reason FedEx has for wanting to get rid of scope is so that they can follow the DHL and Amazon model of using ACMI carriers to take advantage of the much lower cost labor. There is no other way to look at this. If the FedEx pilots give up scope they will know within 12 months that it was a mistake, probably sooner.
I think this has been in the works for a long time. I had always wondered why UPS and FedEx didn't try again with that lawsuit regarding DHL exerting operational control on a US airline. Clearly they could have gone at it again with another judge. I think now we know why they didn't. They realized that if they just let things play out it will establish a precedent that they can exploit for themselves and now they want to cash in on it.
Not only has precedent been set, but the time is right to throw this at the pilot group. In the next five years over 20 percent of their pilot group will be retiring. That's 20 percent that don't need to worry about scope and will likely be very willing to sacrifice it for some small improvement to retirement. So it's easy to get their votes. Then you have another section of the pilot group, and these are usually ones that come from backgrounds where they were able to trust their leadership to at least be on the same team. It typically takes these folks 5 to 10 years to realize they are being lied to, so they can be trusted to drink the Kool Aid and vote as they are told. The way I see the numbers, these two blocks stack the deck in favor of those trying to get rid of scope.
I hope I'm wrong, but I think Art Luby is about to help management destroy another pilot group.â
Scope DHL
âThis is going to be long, and is by no means a complete tale of the events, but it's important to understand the basics. The pilots at FedEx are in great danger of falling down the same path as the DHL pilots.
I'll try to summarize this whole saga. DHL was an American company. The airline was DHL Airways which was 100 percent owned by DHL, much the way AMR corporation owns American Airlines or the way FedEx Corporation owns FedEx Express.
At DHL Airways the callsign was DHL, it said DHL on our uniforms, ID badges, paychecks and our contract. We were DHL pilots to the same extent that pilots for FedEx Express are FedEx pilots. We had a scope clause that tied us to any DHL freight flown in the United States with the usual types of exceptions. It was a very strong scope clause.
When the contract with that scope clause was signed, I have been told by numerous pilots who were there, that Art Luby said it was the strongest scope clause in the industry. I believe he did say that and it's going to matter later in the story.
Then Deutsche Post purchased DHL outright from the owner. Keep in mind that the original founders were all dead at this point. Well Dalsey and Lynn were dead, Hillblom disappeared and is presumed dead.
Of course there is a problem here. Deutsche Post is a German company and under U.S. Law they can't own more than 49% of a US Airline. The solution was to sell 51% of DHL Airways to John Dasburg the former CEO of Northwest Airlines and later Burger King. Deutsche Post sought him out and sold the airline to him for a pittance compared to what the ACMI contract was going to bring in. At the time we didn't understand why DHL wanted Dasburg specifically, but we would eventually find out.
Then 51/49 ownership of DHL Airways meant that it was now an ACMI carrier with an ACMI contract with DHL. This does not invalidate the scope clause but DHL started acting as if it did. The scope clause tied the pilots on the seniority list to DHL freight regardless of who owned what.
Next, UPS and FedEx sued the govt. for allowing DHL Airways to operate. Their argument was that they (meaning UPS and FedEx) were required by the govt to have their own airlines, but that DHL, now a foreign company was exerting operational control over DHL Airways which should have been illegal. They were right of course. DHL decided where the planes go, what they carry, how much fuel to put on and what alternates would be best if the freight couldn't make it to it's primary destination. Their case was rock solid. DHL was foreign owned and although they only owned 49 percent on paper they had 100 percent operational control of the airline.
It looked as if UPS and FedEx would win, but then before he could deliver a verdict the judge was thrown off the case for Xenophobia, which is an unreasonable fear of foreigners. G.W. Bush was president and this time, and his brother Jeb Bush was gov. of Florida and close friends with Dasburg. It's about this time we realized that Dasburg was probably sought out by Deutsche Post for his political connections more than anything else.
During or around this time our contract negotiations were stalled out. DHL filed a lawsuit against our pilot group for âunfair labor practicesâ. The unfair practice they accused us of was essentially just having a scope clause. The idea here was that by filling suit first they could choose a location that would be friendly to them, and this worked to an extent, primarily in running the clock and wearing down the pilot group.
The scope fight was going to be very long and expensive, and if we lost it was going to be a large blow to ALPA. As the fight progressed eventually it started to move in our direction, but this took years and is a discussion all it's own. The short version is that once the scope fight started to go in the right direction, all of the sudden we were offered a contract. This contract had a minor pay raise and essentially eliminated our scope clause.
Now at this point DHL had been subcontracting a lot of other carriers to fly the freight and was not in compliance with our contract. It was blatantly obvious that they wanted to get rid of scope in order to replace us without having any legal problems. You would think in that environment management would have an impossible time convincing pilots to vote for their own demise. However they had an Ace up their sleeve, and that was Alpa's contract administration lawyer Art Luby.
Art Luby is the guy who convinced the DHL Airways pilot group to get rid of scope. Ironically he is the same guy who had said years earlier that this was the strongest scope clause in the business, although at this point he denied he ever said that, and I was in the room when he was challenged on this.
I need to add that by this point the name of DHL Airways had been changed to Astar. With 20/20 hindsight we can see that the obvious reason for doing that was to prevent the DHL brand name from being tarnished when the airline was shut down. Nobody knows who Astar Air Cargo was. This was done by John Dasburg who gave an entirely different reason for doing it, but it's now clear why he did it. For continuity I'll be calling the airline DHL Airways.
Back to Art Luby, he claimed that our jobs would be safe without scope. He now claimed that scope was of no value, but that the job protection covenants he put in the next contract would give us the job security we wanted.
These covenants including promises of increasing the fleet size and adding more modern and newer airplanes to the fleet. There were liquidated damages to be paid to the pilot group if these things didn't come to fruition. Job security was provided by a clause that said the company couldn't furlough pilots unless the freight volume dropped by about 80 percent for some period of time, I think it was 60 days or something like that.
I was talking with everyone I could saying that this contract was a bad idea and that we shouldn't give up scope. The argument I ran into most often was this. âArt Luby is our contract administration lawyer and he says we should sign itâ. First of all that's an argument from authority, which makes it invalid to start with but the even bigger problem is that it's based a a fatal premise.
You see, Art Luby was not our lawyer, and he isn't yours either. He is ALPA's contract administration lawyer. If your pilot groups interests do not align with ALPA national's, then he will be working against you. I'm not saying that's what's happening here but it's critical to understand that he is NOT your lawyer.
Now Art Luby is an incredible person. He is highly intelligent, an excellent speaker and has a lot of charisma. If you meet him in person, you almost can't help but to like the guy, and you will probably want him to like you. I know a lot of of people who were fooled by this. You have to judge the contract by what it says, NOT buy what Art Luby tells you it says.
The Union held meetings, both the in person road show format as well as call in meetings for those who couldn't attend in person. I went to both types. On one call in I pointed out that DHL could get rid of us by simply lowering the volume of cargo for the prescribed period of time. Art Luby suggested that because I couldn't explain how they would go about this that the idea was preposterous, that DHL couldn't possibly lower the volume that much. Of course it turned out Art Luby was 100 percent wrong, once the new contract was signed, within about two or three months DHL put into action a plan to lower the volume by the needed amount and of course it worked.
Back to those job protection covenants. The argument against the value of scope that I heard a lot was that if the airline closes down, then scope is of no value anyway. The example people would often cite was from Eastern Airlines (the original one). They pointed out that the Eastern pilots got next to nothing when the airline closed down and they had scope.
First of all, I don't know what the Eastern guys had in their contract, but that's another situation entirely. Eastern is gone. DHL is NOT gone. DHL Airways is gone because they closed it down, but DHL is not gone. I see their logo on trucks and planes every day it's a strong reminder not to give up scope.
By eliminating scope they can kill off the airline but keep the business going. This is where those job protection covenants will utterly fail you. Once they shut down the airline they don't have to increase the fleet size or do anything. I never got one cent from those covenants, nobody did. Now we did get a deal where we got paid for a few months after we were let go, but that was about all.
The job protection covenants Art Luby will try to sell you on are worthless and he has to know that because they failed utterly when he sold this to the DHL pilot group. I don't know what Art Luby's intentions are, but this doesn't look good to me.
The only reason FedEx has for wanting to get rid of scope is so that they can follow the DHL and Amazon model of using ACMI carriers to take advantage of the much lower cost labor. There is no other way to look at this. If the FedEx pilots give up scope they will know within 12 months that it was a mistake, probably sooner.
I think this has been in the works for a long time. I had always wondered why UPS and FedEx didn't try again with that lawsuit regarding DHL exerting operational control on a US airline. Clearly they could have gone at it again with another judge. I think now we know why they didn't. They realized that if they just let things play out it will establish a precedent that they can exploit for themselves and now they want to cash in on it.
Not only has precedent been set, but the time is right to throw this at the pilot group. In the next five years over 20 percent of their pilot group will be retiring. That's 20 percent that don't need to worry about scope and will likely be very willing to sacrifice it for some small improvement to retirement. So it's easy to get their votes. Then you have another section of the pilot group, and these are usually ones that come from backgrounds where they were able to trust their leadership to at least be on the same team. It typically takes these folks 5 to 10 years to realize they are being lied to, so they can be trusted to drink the Kool Aid and vote as they are told. The way I see the numbers, these two blocks stack the deck in favor of those trying to get rid of scope.
I hope I'm wrong, but I think Art Luby is about to help management destroy another pilot group.â
06-28-2023 | 03:24 PM
#3
Banned
Joined: Aug 2019
Posts: 1,244
Likes: 0
Wow, Hunter's laptop just showed up. Nice cut and paste article. But DHL's demise was UPS and FedEx forcing them out of the express market. Perhaps in all the fear mongering people forget the postal contract FedEx has. You do know there is a condition to fly the USPS freight, you have to have a background check and have lived in the US for five years. So how many, "other" contract carriers's pilots are going to meet those conditions?
I'm sure Art Luby is now the Frank Lorenzo of ALPA. Art wants nothing more than ALPA paying dues members to lose their jobs. So no one is to be trusted, not the MEC, NC, Art Luby, ALPA national, my mailman. Who's going to fill in for the next round of negotiations that won't be suspect of collusion?
Odd how this is the first post from this person. I guess Oncewasgood is back as his evil nemesis.
I'm sure Art Luby is now the Frank Lorenzo of ALPA. Art wants nothing more than ALPA paying dues members to lose their jobs. So no one is to be trusted, not the MEC, NC, Art Luby, ALPA national, my mailman. Who's going to fill in for the next round of negotiations that won't be suspect of collusion?
Odd how this is the first post from this person. I guess Oncewasgood is back as his evil nemesis.
06-28-2023 | 03:55 PM
#4
Gets Weekends Off
Joined: Apr 2013
Posts: 1,626
Likes: 0
Wow, Hunter's laptop just showed up. Nice cut and paste article. But DHL's demise was UPS and FedEx forcing them out of the express market. Perhaps in all the fear mongering people forget the postal contract FedEx has. You do know there is a condition to fly the USPS freight, you have to have a background check and have lived in the US for five years. So how many, "other" contract carriers's pilots are going to meet those conditions?
I'm sure Art Luby is now the Frank Lorenzo of ALPA. Art wants nothing more than ALPA paying dues members to lose their jobs. So no one is to be trusted, not the MEC, NC, Art Luby, ALPA national, my mailman. Who's going to fill in for the next round of negotiations that won't be suspect of collusion?
Odd how this is the first post from this person. I guess Oncewasgood is back as his evil nemesis.
I'm sure Art Luby is now the Frank Lorenzo of ALPA. Art wants nothing more than ALPA paying dues members to lose their jobs. So no one is to be trusted, not the MEC, NC, Art Luby, ALPA national, my mailman. Who's going to fill in for the next round of negotiations that won't be suspect of collusion?
Odd how this is the first post from this person. I guess Oncewasgood is back as his evil nemesis.
Additionally, the requirement for five years to touch or work for USPS was lifted a LONG time ago. FedEx flight operations unfairly used it to screen applicants. DON'T DOUBT ME ON THIS ONE
Stan = Low Information Voter
06-28-2023 | 05:25 PM
#5
Flap Canoe TicTacToe Ref
Joined: Jun 2011
Posts: 228
Likes: 21
From: answering SELCAL, CH-AD
06-28-2023 | 10:48 PM
#7
Banned
Joined: Aug 2019
Posts: 1,244
Likes: 0
I think ignorant is what you mean. But I guess no one wants to really see what happened to DHL. They lost millions on a business plan that didn't work in a tight market. FedEx and UPS lowered rates to compete with DHL. Scope had nothing to do with DHL pulling out of the US. But I guess with todays ability to search for any topic related to DHL pilots losing jobs to a company in bankruptcy can't be hard to find. When your bias is a NO vote, it doesn't matter what the facts are. No one wants to has the guts to post anything that is contrary to the majority vote here except a few. Fortunately this sad, hateful, biased and uniformed group is a minority. Hate is what brings you here. For me this is like the Sunday comics ready the jokes people post. If a new OP with his first post was pro YES, you'd be all over the credibility of that poster.
06-29-2023 | 12:25 AM
#8
Line Holder
Joined: Jan 2017
Posts: 325
Likes: 17
I think ignorant is what you mean. But I guess no one wants to really see what happened to DHL. They lost millions on a business plan that didn't work in a tight market. FedEx and UPS lowered rates to compete with DHL. Scope had nothing to do with DHL pulling out of the US. But I guess with todays ability to search for any topic related to DHL pilots losing jobs to a company in bankruptcy can't be hard to find. When your bias is a NO vote, it doesn't matter what the facts are. No one wants to has the guts to post anything that is contrary to the majority vote here except a few. Fortunately this sad, hateful, biased and uniformed group is a minority. Hate is what brings you here. For me this is like the Sunday comics ready the jokes people post. If a new OP with his first post was pro YES, you'd be all over the credibility of that poster.
However
NO is the time, catch you on the 5 July!
06-29-2023 | 03:28 AM
#9
Beaches and Sand
Joined: Feb 2007
Posts: 371
Likes: 0
From: Chasing Surf
Stan brother, when this thing gets voted down in 7 days.... NO comments and what it means for your future. I hope the majority of us see how underwhelming this document is and vote NO, regroup and go at it again for TA 2.0 (a TA that does not depress industry wages, does not degrade qol, does not split the crew force and offer adequate pension improvement for all since amendable date who have retired). This is business and no one should hold your yes against you.
However
NO is the time, catch you on the 5 July!
However
NO is the time, catch you on the 5 July!
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