Pinnacle Parked Indefinitely by the NMB
 

Yep. I'm not kidding. You poor, poor bastards. I'd be SOOOOO ****ed!

A source is generally a good thing to include when making statements like this.

What is "Parked"?

The title of the thread is misleading. No, the planes are not parked. Talked to a good friend of mine at Pinnacle, and he said NMB didn't release them nor agreed to their terms. It's very disappointing to hear that NMB would side with the management. Again, management wins.

It may be disappointing, but it's predictable, because the NMB is a farce and is controlled by the interests of big business. Pinnacle pilots will remain in pergatory until they capitulate to the needs of their corporate masters.

At least that is what the corporate masters henchmen (NMB) are saying with this action.

It's also a message to other "large" pilot groups out there thinking they'll ever be allowed to strike and cripple the nation..........................it will never happen. It's also another reason why scope is virtually dead. The NMB, courts and politicians will never side with labor on this issue and go against their corporate masters.

Big business is and will always be in the drivers seat. Big brother owns us all, whether we agree or not..........

Eagle,
care to comment on the recent NMB release of Spirit Airlines? Also, what are your thoughts on the new NMB rule change allowing a simple majority vote to unionize? The ATA SUED to stop the change, but a judge sided with the NMB. The new rule takes effect today. Doesn't sound like the new NMB (with Obama appointed Linda Pachela) is serving its "corporate master".

http://www.airlinepilotforums.com/un...le-change.html

This was our last hope. Unfortunatley Spirit is 1/3 the size of pinnacle. Also the spirit strike would only hurt spirit airlines. A pinnacle strike would nearly shut down air service to three or four different cities and a major airline.

Spirit's a small carrier and their shutdown caused minimal inconvienience to the travelling public. Besides, letting them enter self-help is an easy way to reduce some heat about the idea of not allowing airline labor to strike. Doesn't sound like it produced an earth-shattering result either. No "bar" truly raised only the usual "it's better then before and it sets the stage for the NEXT contract", yadda, yadda, yadda...........

The administration needs to be seen as sympathetic to labor (not to be confused with cozy). Unionization theoretically costs corporations more money, but just because one is unionized doesn't mean they'll actually ever be allowed to strike. So it was an easy path to take to give the perception of fairness between business and labor.

The major carriers unions will never be allowed to shut their employer down crippling the nation and further impeding economic interests. A strike at pinnacle would cause major disruption for DAL and thus the country and was considered large enough to do harm, so imagine the thought of a UAL or AA strike...........no way, jose. When it comes to a conflict between airline labor interests and the convienence of the travelling public (taxpayers and voters), politicians (of which the NMB truly listens too) will always go with the public, which is one and the same as their personal interests................it's a no-brainer.

Pinnacle pilots will remain on ice indefinately until either their pilot reps reconsider a stance more in line with company interests -or- their flying is eroded to their new carrier Mesaba slowly, but noticably. At some point, pinnacles pilot union will realize their dilemma and capitulate taking the lesser of two evil routes (a "relaxed" set of goals). The NMB will likely give pinnacle whatever time is necessary to further their interests and increase their leverage.

As far as major airline labor completely shuting down a major carrier (UAL, DAL, AA), that will happen when hell freezes over and I'm afraid the travelling public who vote in the politicians would support the airlines and reward their politicians for not jeopardizing their business travel or visit to aunt patunias for a cheap price.

Thats' the reality, but believe anything you wish.

I have no idea what is going on over at Pinnacle, but what about the NWA pilot strike of 1998? Were they not able to "shut down a major airline"? Did they not "inconvenience the traveling public"? Oh, it's different now? You just got used to 8 years of "no strikes on my watch". This is a different ballgame. That is the reality.

Comair's 2001 strike was on GWB's watch...

Listening to the conference call last night was a waste of time. Our mec seems to keep emphasizing that there is nothing else we can do. I think there is a lot more they can do. They don't want to get in trouble in fear of a work action viloation but you could advise the group to flythe book, write up any mx item, discourage picking up open time...you get the idea. Now they are scrambling to do somethign like picketing. When was the last time we did that? There should have been more pressure on the comany the whole time. What a joke

So, we get no contract but we aquire mesaba....seems fair. Keep up the good work guys, the bonuses this year should be real nice for our execs.

Sorry mesaba guys, you've been pinnaclized...be sure to bring that dr's note in if you call in sick....

You all need to recall your MEC then replace the chairman. That is the only way forward.

Maybe you guys should try to use the resources of XJ now. They went through this in the 2004 contract and in bankruptcy. The guys over there know what they are doing and you now have not only a 9E pilot group, but also a XJ pilot group who are all ticked off. Throw in a ticked off Colgan group and you might be able to get something done.

At this point, everyone needs to put everything aside. Pinnacle is one company and they need one list and one contract. They can have as many certificates as they want but like I said, one list and one contract.

I believe any change in the status quo is an illegal work action.

Do the research, and you'll see GWB was too busy being brought up to speed on being president to deal with a Comair strike. He'd only been in office two months.

From CNN 3/26/01:


If the NMB had determined that the Comair strike would cause "significant harm" economically to a region, then LIKELY a PEB would have been set up. Unless they state that, a PEB isn't even an option.

Hinting that Bush would let 9E (or anyone else) strike is about as flawed as assuming Obama will automatically let it happen.

Absolutely nowhere in that CNN article does it support your claim that GWB was "too busy being brought up to speed on being president to deal with a Comair strike".

The NMB didn't think a Comair strike would cause "significant harm to the country" so a PEB wasn't set up. If Bush was as vehemently anti-labor as some claim, he'd have stopped what he was doing and ended that Comair strike via PEB simply because he could.

But he didn't.

When you think about it, the exact same could be said of the Spirit strike; the Obama Administration knew it wouldn't cause significant harm to the country to lose just 1% of its daily seats so they let them walk. It saves face between the Democrats & labor while causing no long-term harm to the public interest.

I'd bet a C-note he wouldn't let American walk...

I agree. That said, I didn't hint at anything...simply said CMR's strike happened while GWB was President. Which is fact.

Recall Erickson. How long has he been Chairman? Four years? Outside of telling everyone how pi$$ed he is what else has he done for the 9E group. He's out of his league and does nothing to advance your cause.

No matter who is serving the Kool-Aid, it is always poisoned:

Airline Strikes Under the RLA


Jim Jones lives on.......

What can he do? Pretty much nothing. We are all bound by the RLA. NMB isn't helping things by continually letting the company stall. Now TA 1 should never have came to vote. People responsible for that concessionary TA have been replaced.
Also Pinnacle pilots aren't helping the cause: not following the FOM and being unsafe and unprofessional, just to get out on time.

Now we will not see a contract for a LONG LONG time, until the lists have been merged.

Exactly. Or he can finally go and get qualified and go back to the line and he can earn his keep and get the actual tone of the pilot group. Since we can't move forward and accomplish anything, and if they aren't going to tell pilots what to do (short if work action) time to go to work. Sorry nothing personal, just business....

how about a good ole fashioned sick out

ASA showed us that HAVOC, short for not flying broken airplanes works.
Do a search and you will find 1001 broken items on an airplane that are well within your right and duty to put in the logbook. If this means the outstation then so be it.

There were 5 airline strikes under the Bush administration. And there were two others where the cooling off period expired but neither party exercised their right to self help before reaching a settlement.

Not technically true. Yes, Bush was in office, but his NMB wasn't in office yet. The Clinton NMB was still in place and calling the shots when the Comair group was released.

Like I said before, you guys have a very strong partner with the XJ guys. They do not mess around. They have been through this before and will get the best possible outcome. No one needs to do anything other what they were hired to do. Many XJ guys do what they need to do to get things done and do it very unselfishly. I will give you an example.

In December 2007, XJ released a memo threatening to fire people if they released the brake early as they saw it as pilots stealing money by getting on the clock. XJ pilots followed the rules exactly. Did they stop making an extra couple minutes on every flight.....Yup. But guess what happened to on time performance. It tanked in a very big way because the ramp has never been staffed to actually get everything out on time by the book. Rule repealed immediately.

I suggest 9E guys take the same approach. Will it cost you extra money? Probably. Will it be a pain? Yes it will. But it is the only way management teams will ever learn. We all know corners are cut at both Pinnacle and Colgan and it needs to stop. Fly by the book and take your days off to have some fun. If things are broken, write them up without regard to where you are. Safe taxi speeds at all times and do not drop a brake until everyone (including the ramp) is ready to go. If you need a bathrooms break...take it. If you need to go get food...get food. If you are too tired after 12 hours and they want you to do one more quick turn...call in fatigued. I guarantee you this will start to fix problems. The minute everyone starts to play by the book......it will force management to due the same.

9E pilots have already been caught talking about how they cannot wait to get all the jets so they can upgrade and leave the XJ guys to the props. This is probably the worst attitude anyone could have and they need to be put in place. It will start a bitter war between pilot groups and no one will win. (look at America West and US Air).

By the way, when is 9E going to go public with their contract issues. When was the last time they picketed? I know there was one a year ago. They need people picketing weekly. Sometimes it seems like you guys really don't even want to fight for a good contract.

Your link shows that during the last Dem administration, 2 major airlines were allowed to strike (AMR,NWA), AMR twice!! It kinda kills the arguments on this thread that a major airline would NEVER be allowed to strike, don't you think? Oh, and btw, now that the NMB rule change is the law of the land, look for that % union number in this industry to creep up from 46% to near 50%. The Obama NMB just put a damper on your decling union theory.:D

"Drink my children, drink!" Jim Jones

The Kool-Aid is just the same, regardless of who is doing the pouring. Learn that and you might make some progress.


Once you understand that organizing does nothing to create jobs, you might be able to venture out to the fresh idea that a strong economy gives the most people the best chance to do well. This is not to say anything against unions, but to underline the point that putting the cart ahead of the horse won't get you very far. The petty political arguments are completely useless without the fundamentals of a strong nation and a strong economy. Politicos can do almost nothing to create this situation, but they can do a great deal to harm or cripple advancement in this area.

Logical argument to refute this point is impossible. There is a lot of Kool-Aid being poured though, on all sides.

Finally, the facts show a decline in private sector union membership has been going on for over 60 years, this puts to rest the lie that any flavor of Kool-Aid has been helpful and makes it quite clear that our position among world economies is the most important factor in both the number and types of jobs available. It helps not at all to have the best wages and working conditions in the world when you are furloughed or your company or country sinks into failure.

You want to believe that a particular flavor of Kool-Aid will bring you prosperity, but the truth is that the people pouring it have trundled prosperity out the back door while you were savoring the imagined goodness.

Flying strictly by the FAR's, FOM, and CBA is not a work action, it's called doing your job.

This trend has reversed in the last few years. Union rolls are growing. Thank God.

Depends on if you're labor or management. I'd call changing an attendance policy a change to the status quo. Apparently, the NMB sees otherwise.....

.........and will produce nothing.

And look where the change is......all three tenths of one whole percent. Kool-Aid is powerful stuff.

-----------------------------------------------

Published: January 28, 2009
Union membership in the United States rose last year by the largest amount in a quarter-century, a gain of 428,000 members, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced on Wednesday.
: Organized LaborThe bureau said that most of the new members were government employees and that the percentage of workers in unions rose to 12.4 percent of the overall work force last year, up from 12.1 percent in 2007.

The increase is bound to fuel an already feverish political debate over whether to enact a labor-backed bill that would make it easier for workers to unionize. Business groups that oppose the bill can point to the new report to argue that such legislation is unnecessary because unions are already growing under current law.

But union leaders said Wednesday that it remained far too difficult to unionize workers in the private sector.

Most Democrats support the bill, the Employee Free Choice Act, saying that making it easier for unions to grow will help strengthen the nation’s middle class during tough economic times. But Republicans denounce the bill because it would give workers the right to gain union recognition as soon as a majority signed cards saying they wanted a union, rather than through secret-ballot elections.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 36.8 percent of government employees belong to unions, compared with just 7.6 percent of workers in the private sector. Typically, state and city officials do not fight unionization efforts, while private-sector employers, fearing higher labor costs, often vigorously resist organizing drives.

The bureau noted that the percentage of workers in unions has dropped from 20.1 percent in 1983, with the decline especially noteworthy among private-sector workers because of a sharp drop in manufacturing jobs as a result of plant closings and pressures from imports. The bureau said 11.4 percent of manufacturing workers, once the heart of organized labor, were in unions.

The bureau said 16.1 million workers belonged to unions at the end of 2008. The number of unionized government workers grew by 275,000 last year and the number of unionized private sector workers grew by slightly more than 150,000.

Some economists discounted as a statistical fluke the bureau’s report last year that the number of unionized workers had jumped by 311,000 in 2007. Unions have made significant gains in organizing by persuading various governors and state legislatures to allow the unionization of tens of thousands of teachers, home-health aides and home-based child care providers.

It's not technically changed yet--the CIH policy is the only thing that has technically changed...the "change" of which you speak was a memo that scared lots of people into submission (sick calls went back down)...

I'm ashamed of our group--seriously--a MEMO comes out and the Northern Mississippi/Alabama flying club freaks out and stops calling in sick...typical, typical, typical...

It has had a positive effect. Notice I wasn't parked at the table in the crew room this week? Yeah, apparently the sick scare and the 200% open time netted me THREE reserve days at home where my phone never rang. I called scheduling after my last contactable period ended just to make sure I was still employed.....

I'd trade those home reserve days for a better contract, though.

It's been my experience that doing your job within the confines of the FOM and JCBA without going above and beyond your job requirements will slow the operation down and begin creating ripple effects as schedules are compromised. It may not cripple the company but it may cause enough headaches in other parts of the company, scheduling, maintenance control, dispatch, and most importantly management to get their attention. Of course the pilot group as a whole needs to fly the contract not just one or two crews, this is where unity is important.

It's a shame there is so little unity in this business.

This is pretty much true, especially here. Without the pilots (both CAs and FOs) coordinating things and constantly pushing the other departments (or flat out correcting their mistakes), I don't think we'd have more than 10% on-time performance. Late boarding? Don't mention it to the gate agent. No cargo slip yet? Don't close the door. See a scheduling issue where you're going to time out? Don't call until you time out.

Now, obviously things like alternates that are required but dispatch failed to read the TAF properly (or the one dispatcher is so swamped with flights, he or she did the release 4-5 hours before hand) and MX screw ups (like forgetting to sign something off) need to be addressed because we're legally on the hook as well.

Then the all democrats including Obama should be voted out at the next election. After all, if memory serves me, ALPA supported him/democrats because they were supposed to be more "labor friendly". Doesn't look that way.

then your not paying attention. Ob has appointed former union chiefs to head the FAA and to the NMB. Just b/c Eaglefly says the NMB is a farce does not make it so. They just changed RLA union voting rules which withstood a court challenge from the ATA and they released Spirit Airlines from mediation which resulted in a stirke. A FAR cry from the previous admin. That bogus union vote rule was in effect for decades!! Now, thanks to this NMB, a simple majority wins. Delta's employee groups and Skywest's pilot group will be unionized on the next go around. Bank on it. This is huge.

Then why after negotiating for over 5 years did they put us on ICE. The LEAST they could have done was tell us to meet back with them in a couple of weeks.

I am curious if the NMB knew what was coming at Corp.

It's interesting that healthcare came out of left field when it was previously a non-issue.... XJ has a pretty good BK deal with the exception of their BK-gutted medical benes.

Also interesting dual-qual. We stood on "No" because they wouldn't tell us why they needed it and with 16 airframes there was no movement to make an arrangement that kept it safe and financially worth while with the additional risks and responsibilities (a different airplane to remain "current" and "proficient" on).

The NMB isn't a group to explain their reasons, if they did it would helpful to all of us. There are plenty of conspiracy theories, even I have my thoughts, but it doesn't change what has unfolded in the last couple weeks. A month ago ICE and PNCL buying XJ would have not even been starbucks rumors- it would have been a saucer discussion over beers for being "out there". Now we don't have a contract and yet another airline being put into the mix. Simply the Best at buying airlines.