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Originally Posted by sailingfun
What is left out of many of these posts is a dose of reality. As a example one poster stated that massive furloughs started 90 days after the 2001 contract and he implies it was all the fault of the scope give backs. Lets get real here. In the summer of 2001 they had the biggest drop in business yield in the history of the airline industry. Then we had 911. All in that 90 day window. Furloughs are going to happen every time under those conditions.
Sailing,
What you and our MEC overlook is that "Delta, Inc." did not furlough. In fact, Delta
hired more pilots from 2000 to 2005 than it has in any other time in its history. Delta Connection carriers hired about three pilots for every Delta pilot furloughed and in many cases, furloughed Delta pilots found work at the DCI carriers that replaced them. No one could have conceived that the regional pilots would outnumber the mainline pilots in ALPA, but today that is nearly true, even though roughly half the DCI pilots are not in ALPA.
When a mainline job is replaced by a regional job, that IS A FAILURE OF SCOPE! When a union job is replaced by non union workers, THAT IS A FAILURE of scope. We have seen entry level Delta jobs vanish as Delta made a huge investment in new equipment. Over 11 billion dollars was spent replacing 727's, and 737-200's with Regional Jets, replacing Express and Shuttle with Comair and well, Shuttle, flown by Teamsters pilots.
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Scope is far more complex then what is posted here. Virtually every pilot posting here seems to make the assumption that if we took back all the RJ flying tomorrow the network would look the same and we would have a 1 for 1 increase in pilot jobs at Delta. This is not true. I had a long talk with someone very involved in past negotiations. The simply fact is that we can't do the flying many of the regionals do and get within a country mile of their cost structure on that flying. If all the flying belonged to the mainline we would have to cede many markets to other airlines with lower cost feed. Lose feed and you lose flights on the larger aircraft.
Lets look at the genesis of that logic:
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Originally Posted by Duane Woerth, June 28, 2001
Our contract scope clauses are our outsourcing control mechanisms... As CEO of ALPA I’ll freely admit that my goal is to maximize pilot shareholder value within all those alliances. No apologies, no excuses. That’s just the simple truth.
When our union's President starts to sound like United CEO Glenn Tilton, I start to get concerned....
I have had a long talk with these same people. It ends, in every case, with their admission that they have not updated their economic analysis since the concessionary negotiations in bankruptcy. They say that it is not just pilot costs, but also the cost of aircraft support, under wing baggage handling, gate agents and maintenance. Their argument overlooks the fact that Delta has consolidated most of these functions into Delta Regional Handling and Delta mainline (in the case of ASA) to
save money establish control and be more efficient.
Besides, if their argument is true, why did we merge Delta and Northwest?
Aside from cost, there are additional revenue possibilities by operating 90 seat jets at mainline with 90 seats in them, as opposed to 76 seats. The sale of 14 additional seats has to be worth more than it would cost to pay an entry level Delta pilot for that work.
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Dalpa's job is to provide the best quality of life and career earnings for pilots on the seniority list. The round of pilots wanting to throw out the current MEC and replace them is a never ending cycle. I have seen at least 3 of them in my career. When the new guys get in and see the real numbers and face the real facts guess what happens. They become just like the old guys and the same thing will happen this time. Reality sucks but its still reality.
Here, we agree. I do not advocate throwing out our MEC to replace them with a more radical version of the same thing.
We also agree that change is needed.
We MUST return to our core beliefs as a union. We will find power in unity and it is our best argument at the negotiating table. Rather than finding reasons why it is best to have a separate DCI, we need to be looking for ways to facilitate Delta pilots performing Delta flying.
This outsourcing started all the way back at Randy Babbitt, who now ironically is the head of a FAA Administration being lambasted for their regulation of a regional airline where training expenses had been stripped to the absolute core to make possible the vision of costs "a country mile lower" than ours. Mr. Babbitt has repeatedly said it was a mistake and that ALPA should have found a way to make this flying work at mainline. If Mr. Babbitt eventually saw the light, I hope the current generation in power can also come to this realization.
For starters, we need new numbers. As was resolved in Council 44, we need economic analysis of the benefits of unity. As you know, the MEC resolved by acclimation NOT to STUDY unity.
How do we deal with that? I dunno, you got any ideas?