Regionals won't be paying any less, unless their pilots make concessions (bonuses and paid ATP are gone for a while though). The way regional pay will drop is simply by inflation over time, since they don't have leverage for pay increases. It would take some number of years for inflation (or worse, scheduled contract expiration and rebids) to push regional pay down too much.

This thing is obviously going to hurt, but I don't think it will drag on long enough to crush all of the recent labor gains... the general attitude of most pilots seems to be "furlough me before concessions".

 

Maybe... But it is hard to judge the strength of a will that has not yet been tested.

 

Why do the unions let them get away with this?

 

the masons have the mec’s in their pocket, everyone knows that.

 

That's how the regional industry is supposed to work. It's fairly union-proof, by design.

 

Seems pretty tested to me, we're weeks away from thousands of furloughs and I don't see any movement to shred contracts to avert that, mostly the opposite. Some contracts do have pre-defined furlough mitigation procedures baked-in, that's obviously pre-meditated and thus does not degrade the contract.

I don't think anybody really expects to avoid furloughs, except in maybe a few niches or a few lucky regionals (at the expense of other, terminated regionals). The real debate is whether to make concessions to avoid BK, but we all know how that turned out last time, so there's doesn't seem to be any appetite there either.

 

Then why bother having a union if they don't do anything to help the workers?

 

don’t do anything and act within the bounds of their negotiating leverage are very different concepts

 

Mercy? Is that you?

mercys ghost mercys ghost mercys ghost

Did it work?

 

I dunno how long you’ve been in the regional world but look at Comair. They went on strike in 2001 to fight for a livable wage at a time when most regional FOs were making much less than $20 an hour. Their contract was one of the best in the regional world when they emerged. But look at what slowly happened to them. Slowly but surely Delta whittled them down to nothing and eventually shut them down. Delta also has a long memory and the pilots bit the hand that fed them by going on strike. They got too expensive in Delta’s eyes and Delta knew they could get the flying done for less, so they got rid of them. As a regional pilot, the cards or so stacked in the mainline partners favor that it’s not a game worth playing. I never understood the guys who were content on riding out their careers at a regional.

But either way, that’s why regionals are basically union proof... There’s no leverage there. Once you get too expensive they don’t renew your contracts, they sell your planes to some new company without senior employees or unions, and start over from scratch on their terms.