Jim Rockford

I fail to see how hiring a willing employee is illegal. I think you're reaching there.

Andy

To the best of my knowledge, it's never been done in the past. If it were legal, I'd think that at least one major would have done so by now. And Avelo's route structure doesn't look like a direct threat to any of the majors. Is there much overlap with Southwest?

rickair7777

I'm not reaching, I know as fact and you can research it in 60 seconds with a little google, I'm not going to do that for you.

You can of course hire willing employees. You could actually hire ALL of a competitors employees and put them out of business, as the long as the recruiting and hiring process was fair and even-handed, ie the decisions were made based on qualifications and experience, and NOT who they currently worked for.

What you cannot do is SPECIFICALLY target a competitor's employees with the intent of harming the competitor.

Example... you advertise job openings. You get 10,000 applications from experienced workers in your industry, from ten different employers. Lets say you hire a 1,000 but 990 of them are from one particular competitor. That business would have a case, ie why did you not hire evenly from across the industry? You'd then have to show that your decision-making was based strictly on the resumes of the workers in question.

If the target employer happened to have the most qualified workers, which naturally floated to the top of your selection process, then so be it. But that's not very likely, if the only discernible pattern was that everybody you hired came from competitor X, that's not going to fly, it's an unfair business practice.

Anecdote, years ago mesa was losing pilots to OO and they wanted to fight back. They couldn't target OO pilots directly, so they offered hiring bonuses to regional pilots with "United Express Experience". Of course you and I know the paint on an RJ is irrelevant to pilot experience and qualifications, but apparently mesa decided that would legally help them narrow their focus. They didn't have many takers BTW, that river was flowing pretty strongly in the other direction.

Flip side of that... majors have at various times in the past agreed to reduce hiring from certain regionals so as to not harm their business partners. Anti-poaching agreements among competitors are not legal, but they do appear to be legal for partner companies (ie major and regional FFD). Flow agreements are simply formal incarnations of that... they exist not to provide mainline with pilots (they have plenty of apps) but rather to control the upward flow of FFD pilots.

BobbyLeeSwagger

With Breeze being such a small pilot group and over half having a degree and 1000pic or more, I think it would be a small blip in the grand hiring scheme for a large employeer to offer CJOs to those qualified people. That could cause a very big problem for them very quickly

rickair7777

Oh sure, as long as there's plenty of hiring across the board, the other majors could quickly overwhelm breeze with attrition without even meaning to do it, or realizing they're doing it. B6, F9, NK, et al got big contractual improvements right before covid because none of them wanted to be the only major with a substantially sub-standard compensation package and hiring spooling up to epic levels. It worked too, few CA's leave the LCC's now.

Breeze could find itself with high attrition just by having 1) pilots with competitive quals 2) low compensation and 3) uncertain future progression (both growth and contract). At this point we've all seen the start-up movie where it takes ten years to get a union and entry-level contract.

But DAL cannot hire 100 pilots in 2020, with 96 of them coming from breeze while blatantly ignoring the other 10,000 apps they have on file.

Jim Rockford

No, unless the employee is contractually bound by non-compete clauses or having possible trade secrets, its perfectly OK to hire as many as you want here in the good ole USA.

rickair7777

If the intent and application is to hire the best employees, and they happen to work for a specific company, sure. If that hurts the other guy, oh well.

It's done all the time in IP intensive industries where everybody wants the A-Team (although there are often issues such as non-compete and non-disclosure agreements that get in the way).

What you cannot do is try to intentionally damage a competitor by intentionally hiring an unreasonable and disproportionate number of their employees for no good reason except to damage them. That falls under "Predatory" behavior and is an anti-trust violation, most especially if you're doing to to smaller competitors (there are other types of predatory behavior as well, not limited to employment practices).

“when talent is acquired not for purposes of using that talent but for purposes of denying it to a competitor,”

https://www.foley.com/en/insights/pu...ees-be-an-anti

Air Guitar

They're already cutting cities and jacking up prices. What's really going on?

Halon1211

I was just told my training class with Avelo was canceled.

Triggs

That was short lived