Given the changes that appear to be happening in the Teamsters Airline Division; i.e., cleaning house at Local 747 and bringing aboard people who understand pilots and their contracts, I'd say that they would take the same position as before. Not that they were uninterested, but they didn't want to have a mess dumped into their lap to untangle. So it seems that if you have the same people doing the same things, they won't want to get involved until there is a concerted effort to get rid of the people who are still creating the problems.

Rumor is that the negotiations at Atlas/Polar, long delayed by ALPA (Prater and York), got a kick start by the Teamsters and within less than 60 days of their decertification by ALPA, they had a professional airline negotiator assigned to them with many years of former ALPA experience and they are moving forward at a good pace. It's recently slowed because the negotiator for management left his law firm (Ford-Harrison), to go work with Delta, so they have to get a new one. Even so, they're still on track.

News out today is that ALPA is now facing an Unfair Labor Practices suit for the way it fired it's own union employees. About a month or so back, they walked away from bargaining and imposed a contract on Unit 1.

I thought this was the kind of crap ALPA was supposed to be opposed to? Or do they speak with forked tongue? It's a pretty sad day when a labor union stoops to the level of airline management.

Makes you wonder how we can trust them to look out for pilots when they are willing to screw their own?

ALPA as a pilot union and ALPA as an employer are two completely different animals.

Consider the loss of dues revenue over the last couple years by pay cuts alone. ALPA, like other employers, cannot afford the staffing, pay and benefits they could in the past. However, given that cuts are necessary, ALPA deals with their Unit One employees in a more straight forward manner than other employers do with THEIR unions.

Saying that they weren't interested was merely a copout. Bourne knew that he was going to lose that representational election in a massive landslide, and he didn't want the negative publicity while trying to get his new airline division off the ground. It was a smart move, but claiming that he wasn't interested is a complete falsehood. He wanted AirTran bad.

No disagreement here. ALPA has very poorly handled the Unit 1 situation. I tend to agree with Unit 1: if money is a factor, cap Jalmer's salary at $250k. Don't take from the people that are actually making the union run on a day-to-day basis.