gloopy

That's what I think they say as well. However if there really is red hot demand there's still going to be a need for tons of CFI's and all the other jobs that will become supply pressured with industry wide hiring. The free market will easily ramp up for it just as it has in the past. At the tail end of the last hiring boom we saw minimums slashed and (mostly bottom tier regionals) snapping up sub 500 hour wonders but for most of the cycle "twelve and two" was pretty much a hard min no matter what college you went to. And they still found plenty of pilots.

There's going to be a re-emmerging market for experience oriented flight schools/academies and IMO the successful ones will be able to crush the big uni programs on price, more than making up for the 500 hour differential. They are often set up for the old system (zero time to 300 hours direct to an all glass jet) and that simply isn't relevant anymore. If you have to build time anyway, there's really no advantage in doing touch and goes in quarter million dollar gee whiz glass candy singles for 2-4 times the price.

And you can get 500 hours in under 6 months easy as long as you have a large enough supply of students. If hiring picks up to anywhere near the levels many are saying it will, the career will attract the prospective candidates. If it doesn't, the 500 hours between the two systems likely won't be a major factor anyway. Especially considering that in order to "save" that modest amount of flight time you'll have to spend way, way more tacking it on to your already 6 figure degree in basket weaving studies with a minor in graduation. Plenty of schools will pop up offering 1500 hour programs for significantly less than big uni 1000 hour ones. Not to mention its a quick button push to get rid of the degree requirement in the first place. If there is a squeeze on hiring/supply, that will be one of the first things they do.

forgot to bid

How was he an ALPA member for 20 years? Or was he CAL prior to the strike? Because ALPA didn't come back on CAL property and replace the IACP until 2000 or 2001 right?

dalad

Here's the story FTB Flying the Line II: Chapter 14 So Hank Duffy would receive a rough baptism in this first great crisis of his presidency, as he fought Lorenzo through a thicket of bankruptcy court decrees no other ALPA strike effort had ever encountered. In the long run, ALPA could claim a qualified victory in that Congress changed the bankruptcy law to prevent any future Lorenzo-style use of it for union-busting. But in the short run and as viewed from the trenches by striking Continental pilots, long-term victories were hard to appreciate.

Events that occurred in the first three weeks of the Continental strike almost foreordained its unhappy outcome. As we have seen, Continental’s dazed MEC told pilots to report to work “under duress” (whatever that meant), following the initial 72-hour bankruptcy shutdown. Lorenzo would not have been able to fly the schedule he planned if the Continental MEC had ordered a walkout from the start. When the Continental MEC belatedly initiated the strike three days later, on October 1, some pilots, accustomed by now to Lorenzo’s Emergency Work Rules, stayed in their cockpits. This group (about 75 pilots) would be joined by approximately 200 more crossovers in October. These “October scabs” would split almost evenly between former TXI and “old” Continental pilots. One of those “urban legends” that plagued the strike effort had a higher number of TXI pilots scabbing than “old” Continental pilots.

“It was quite common for the Continental pilots to believe the Texas guys were scabbing in greater numbers,” recalls Guy Casey, the steady ex-USAF pilot who served as strike coordinator. “I had access to all the records, I checked on it, and it just wasn’t true. I had to go around to all the bases where Continental pilots lived to tell them the percentages were basically the same.”

So, with these pilots (about 20 percent of the prestrike workforce, counting the relatively large contingent of management pilots pressed into service), Lorenzo would be able to fly, if only just barely, about 20 percent of his prestrike schedule, despite ALPA’s “job action.” If weather delays had burned up crew time, Lorenzo would have faced an early shutdown. But placid high pressure dominated October’s weather—a bad omen.

Lorenzo’s success in getting that first group of pilots to cross during the early days of the strike owed much to the skill that earned him the nickname “Frankie Smooth Talk.” Using a technique familiar to old TXI pilots, Lorenzo began to phone pilots personally. Armed with specific details about each pilot’s family situation, such as whether he had a wife or child who might be ill, Lorenzo could be a formidable salesman. Rather than threats, Lorenzo’s most effective tactic was to project a sense of concern, an earnestness that he really needed each pilot. Lorenzo had an undeniable gift for this kind of cajolery, as do all good salesmen. Lorenzo telephoned so many pilots, at all hours, that many wondered when he slept! It was devastatingly effective—Lorenzo’s verbal magic even persuaded one member of Continental’s MEC to cross!

“Look, Frank’s a savvy guy, and he can really be slick,” says Dennis Higgins, former TXI MEC chairman and veteran of many one-on-one confrontations with Lorenzo. “A guy would go home at night from the picket line a strong strike supporter, showing not a flaw in his defenses. The phone rings, and it’s Frank Lorenzo! The pilot sits there with his mouth wide open, and Frank says, ‘I want you to understand that I understand why you are doing what you’re doing. All I want is a chance to explain why we are doing what we are doing, and also to let you know that I need you badly and that I want you to come back so we can put this thing back together just exactly the way you have envisioned.’ Now if the guy hasn’t hung up by this point, he’s hooked! The next day, it’s like he’s kidnapped; we can’t find him, and somebody reports he’s crossed. Frank was good, you bet! The only defense was to say ‘Merry Christmas, Frank,’ and hang up before he started talking.”

Certain aspects of the modern airline pilot’s lifestyle also gave Lorenzo an advantage. Although no statistics exist to specifically prove it, a consensus of opinion holds that airline pilots tend to live up to the limit of their credit—and sometimes a little beyond. A lifestyle full of expensive toys, boats, and second homes left many Continental pilots “financially challenged.” Lorenzo had sources that allowed him to target these pilots with his phone calls—particularly the divorced.

“As soon as a guy’s captain bid comes out, he and his wife start looking for a captain’s house,” Dennis Higgins observes wryly. “Lots of guys were financed to the hilt, particularly those with second wives and new families. The wife would, in the privacy of the home, ask, ‘Are we going to have to move out of the house, take the kids out of the private school, deliver a car back to the bank?’ A pilot’s got to carry the uncertainty of the strike home to her and be able to justify it when the phone rings and she says, ‘It’s Frank Lorenzo!’”

uvuflier

Proud ALPA member despite telling a class full of budding pilots that while he did not like unions, they were "...a necessary evil."
For shame!

dalad

A little more from FTL If the Continental strikers had been able to hold those first critical 300 pilots on their side of the picket line in October, Lorenzo almost certainly would have capitulated. For three nervous weeks, Lorenzo trembled on the edge of defeat. He didn’t have enough management pilots to fly his projected schedule for more than a few days, and the sheer logistics of requalification meant that he couldn’t get enough of the 400 Continental furloughees or “off-the-street” new-hires into his cockpits in time to save the situation. In any case, Lorenzo didn’t advertise for “permanent replacement” new-hires until November.

But as October progressed, he was getting enough picket-line crossers to hope that he might not have to hire any pilots “off the street.”

“In the first two weeks, vast numbers were crossing the picket line,” says Dennis Higgins. “There was a lot of concern as to whether we could get that hemorrhaging under control.”

As things steadied, and when it looked like ALPA’s lines were going to hold at the first batch of crossovers, Lorenzo would find pilots elsewhere. But he would have lost without those October “in-house” scabs, particularly a group of 110 who crossed during the third weekend of the strike when the MEC seemed to be in turmoil owing to the recall of Larry Baxter (which we will discuss shortly). As Lorenzo’s skeleton pilot force nearly ran up against the maximum FAA-imposed flight time limits and a shutdown loomed during the closing days of the month, he grew desperate. Proof of Lorenzo’s desperation lay in his quite uncharacteristic willingness to resume serious negotiations in late October.

“In the early stages, Lorenzo wasn’t sure he was going to pull it off in terms of adequate numbers of pilots,” believes Kirby Schnell, whose 553 combat missions as a Marine pilot in Vietnam engendered a toughness that would sustain him as the Continental pilots’ Negotiating Committee chairman throughout the strike. “Once we stabilized our lines, the negotiations were probably as close to real as anything we ever had. But when large numbers of our own pilots started back to work [during the third week], from then on, Lorenzo’s negotiating was nothing more than maintaining a posture for public consumption.”

Once Lorenzo had survived that first month and he realized that he would have a breathing space in which to hire “permanent replacements,” to tap into the reservoir of unemployed pilots who would unhesitatingly cross ALPA’s pickets, negotiations became a sham. By November, the second month of the strike, only hard, remorseless struggle remained.

Although the conventional wisdom holds that after the first month the decks were stacked against the Continental pilots, they were not without weapons, and they made a good fight of it. The courts provided a promising avenue of attack. Because of Lorenzo’s use of the bankruptcy laws, ALPA had standing as a litigant. Continental’s pilots were creditors under the bankruptcy rules because Lorenzo owed them money for unpaid salaries and unfunded pensions. Furthermore, there was always the possibility that he would lose—that a judge would disallow cancellation of union contracts under the bankruptcy code. Eventually, as we shall see, these court actions would not turn out well for ALPA, but they did provide the fulcrum from which ALPA would exert leverage to force Lorenzo into court-ordered negotiations that would bring about the “Order and Award” settlement of 1985. But for many months to come, nobody could be sure of the outcome of these legal actions, so the war had to continue as if they didn’t exist.

In another Korean War analogy, despite the fact that peace talks began at Panmunjom in July 1951, U.N. forces had to continue fighting for two more years, because nobody could be sure that the maddeningly slow negotiations would ever produce anything. The role of embittered, unemployed ex-Braniff pilots in this drama was as critical as the intervention of Chinese “volunteers” on the side of the defeated North Koreans.

“The big difference at Continental was that 4,000 surplus pilots were out there,” Hank Duffy said sadly in his 1990 interview. “The Braniff pilots were pushing each other out of the way to get in.”

Here again, a statesmanlike gesture on the part of Hank Duffy quite unintentionally aggravated the situation. When Braniff emerged from bankruptcy in March 1984, it did so under a new ALPA contract with pay and working conditions many striking Continental pilots thought equivalent to Lorenzo’s. News of this new Braniff contract came almost simultaneously with the Bildisco Decision, angering many weary Continental pilots, who were wavering as their strike settled into its sixth month.

“My first involvement with Braniff was signing that contract,” Hank Duffy explained later. “I debated it and decided I would bring that inferior contract in with an ALPA imprimatur. We held out for all the boilerplate, seniority, and grievance, but anything that cost money we just weren’t going to get.”

Duffy’s contractual lenience toward Braniff’s new owner, Jay Pritzker of Hyatt Hotel fame, struck many Continental strikers as oddly out of sync with ALPA’s policy toward Lorenzo. Of course the great difference between the new Braniff contract and the conditions Lorenzo offered was that the Pritzkers negotiated with ALPA, whereas Lorenzo imposed his terms unilaterally. Duffy hoped that once Braniff was on its feet financially, the “B-scale” contract he signed could be upgraded. As it turned out, he was right, although in 1989, immediately after agreeing to the “industry standard” contract that the first agreement was calculated to procure, “Braniff II” would succumb to “Bankruptcy II.”

So it all came to nothing, but that lay in the future. For the moment, the Continental pilot’s view from the trenches lacked this foresight, and the substandard Braniff contract produced considerable grumbling on the picket line and an increased willingness to cross.

The peculiar nature of the strike’s inception added another handicap. Repeatedly, Lorenzo would ask pilots he telephoned how they had voted on the strike. Lorenzo knew full well that there had been no formal strike ballot, merely a show of hands in crowded mass meetings at the various domiciles, under the kind of confused, “fog of war” conditions any combat veteran would remember.

“There never was a formal mail ballot,” Guy Casey agrees, “but there were voice and hand votes at all the local council meetings, and they were all decidedly in favor of striking.”

dalad

The end of the CAL strike. I had read FTL as a new hire and had to find my dusty copy. I highly recommend another read. Then Lorenzo outsmarted himself—finally.

On Aug. 26, 1985, Lorenzo moved to terminate the ALPA contract. Declaring that Continental’s original acceptance of ALPA as the collective bargaining agent for its pilots was “voluntary” and had never been certified by a formal vote, Lorenzo announced that he was withdrawing the recognition. With 1,400 of his pilots having signed a petition requesting it, Lorenzo declared that a majority of all his pilots, even if the 1,000 strikers were included in the total, favored decertification of ALPA. He then unilaterally broke off the court-ordered negotiations, which had been sputtering on ineffectually.

At this point, cocky and overconfident, riding the crest of dozens of puff pieces in the business press describing him as “the wonderboy who took on the unions and won” and “the man who proved deregulation would work,” Lorenzo stubbed his toe. Notwithstanding that Bob Six had “voluntarily” accepted ALPA as the bargaining agent for Continental pilots back in 1942, Lorenzo could not unilaterally withdraw that recognition.

Established precedent in NLRB case law required a formal, supervised ballot—not the informal ballot Lorenzo announced. Having gotten away with canceling the wage and working conditions portion of the ALPA contract, Lorenzo figured the bankruptcy court would now permit total cancellation of the entire contract under the same rationale, and without going through the formal decertification process.

So without waiting for the bankruptcy court to rule on his high-handed action, Lorenzo announced an expansion of Continental’s flight schedule. Ironically, Lorenzo had been so successful at breaking the strike that he now needed more pilots. On Sept. 9, 1985, thinking ALPA’s legal challenge to his decertification would fail, Lorenzo announced a “vacancy bid” for nearly 500 captain and first officer positions, plus the hiring of an undetermined number of second officers “off the street.” Lorenzo believed his “decertification” of ALPA meant that striking pilots would have no standing to bid for these positions.

One final crisis now loomed for the Continental MEC. While ALPA tried to persuade the bankruptcy court of the illegality of Lorenzo’s decertification, the leaders of Continental’s pilot group would get one last grab for a very tarnished brass ring. Reluctantly, under severe prodding by ALPA’s outside legal counsel Bruce Simon, they agreed to submit bids for these new “vacant” pilot positions.

“It was two o’clock in the morning, and we were read the riot act by Bruce Simon, who told us it’s going downhill from here,” Vice-Chairman Pete Lappin recalls of the MEC meeting. “Most of us didn’t want to call off the strike for anything less than total victory. But we were losing people to suicide! Simon persuaded me that we had to swallow this piece of ****, save some jobs and some lives.”

Lorenzo promptly filed a petition with the court stating that the strikers were “not entitled to any of the bid vacancies under any circumstances,” because all of them had already been awarded to “permanent replacements.” The federal bankruptcy court thought otherwise.

On Oct. 31, 1985, Judge Roberts entered an “Order and Award” (O&A) of the bankruptcy court imposing a settlement on Lorenzo. Often denounced as the “Surrender Agreement” by militant Continental strikers, the O&A was, in fact, far better. Describing his O&A as a “global settlement,” Judge Roberts required that Lorenzo offer his pilots three options, ranging from reinstatement in order of seniority (according to a complicated formula) to severance pay of $4,000 for each year of service. Pilots who wished to retain their right to litigate further would also be reinstated, but only after all pilots who waived that right. Although not all former Continental captains moved immediately into the left seat, Lorenzo had to guarantee a substantial number of them captain’s pay anyway.

Within a year of the O&A, most Continental strikers were back in their cockpits—but not all. Guy Casey, Dennis Higgins, Dennis Duffy, Larry Baxter, Pete Lappin, to name but a few, did not appear on Continental’s seniority list. From the beginning, Lorenzo privately made it clear that he would never accept pilots who had played a leadership role in the strike.

Poststrike harassment is nothing new in ALPA’s history, but the subtlety of Lorenzo’s campaign set a new standard. His primary weapon was the polygraph machine, or “lie detector,” a device premised upon the unscientific notion that lying triggers certain physiological changes in fibbers. Lorenzo used these contraptions on Continental’s strike leaders in conjunction with legal depositions designed to ferret out knowledge of illegal acts committed during the strike. Although not admissible as evidence during a trial, the Texas bankruptcy court permitted Lorenzo to use them internally—a decision ALPA challenged unsuccessfully.

Armed with polygraph results, Lorenzo set out to make life difficult for Continental’s strike leaders during requalification.

“There were about a dozen individuals who were very active, vocal, and visible during the strike that the company didn’t want back under any circumstances,” says Kirby Schnell, who now works for the FAA. “Ed Nash [one of the few strike leaders who currently flies for Continental] is probably still looking over his shoulder, and that is nothing derogatory about Ed.”

“On days off, the company kept wanting Pete Lappin and me to submit to polygraph tests,” says Guy Casey, who finally found the harassment too much and went to work for United. “Then they said I had a heart problem, and I had to take a bunch of tests at my own expense—they showed I didn’t.”

One by one, all the principal strike leaders, when questioned about poststrike harassment, ask to “go off the tape.” They can’t prove what they say, and they know how litigious Lorenzo can still be. So they choose words carefully. But in every instance, they insist that they were privately warned by old friends in management (of which, surprisingly, there were more than a few) not to come back, that they would never make it through training. Save yourself the trouble, they were told, take “Option III,” the $4,000 per year severance pay, and run. Most did.

“Frank hates me, so I never considered going back,” says Dennis Higgins, whose consistent geniality masked the gut-fighter he had proven himself to be. Short and muscular, with a ready smile and disarming manner, Higgins built a nonflying career in labor relations after the strike.

scambo1

Dalad;
Thanks for sharing that. Even as we at DAL are quite pleased with the way things are going for our company, we cannot forget the reality that our CEO had a hand in the whole CAL scab fiasco as one of Lorenzo's Lt.s In fact many of Lorenzo's disciples are at the helms of several airlines.

Leopards and spots.

gloopy

That's not unique to airline pilots as much as it is a self induced reality of the way most people live these days. While you occasionally read one off stories like a librarian that retired making 35K a year her whole life with over a million in the bank (or matress), the truth is our entire economy is based on spending tomorrow's money today (and then some).

You bet that savvy managements know this. Even blue collar union bosses in bed with their managements know this. They will truffle sniff their membership, getting a feel for each worker's "monthly nut" and then, knowing what they earn, they know exactly how dependant on the job they truly are. Today you can add in the self induced artificial crisis of education costs, as today's parents dump near or even above 6 figures per "26 year old kid" for worthless degrees they know for an iron clad fact will produce zero ROI in the long run. Even worse is how emotionally attatched they become to the concept. The pressures of keeping that captain's house or the boat is massive, but its nothing compared to keeping daddy's little girl in school dropping 40 large every year to extend her childhood and delay her inevitable still entry level job.

This is a key element of unity that we're missing. If you can't walk away, they own you.

ClarenceOver

Just sent over 700 spam messages to that email.

DeadHead

I'm going to go out on a limb and figure he'll probably be interested in all the latest advancements and special limited time offers regarding men's erectile dysfunction products. It'll probably come in handy when the missies are feeling frisky. Might even help him with his slouch and/or make him taller.