Yep, it was SWAPA not SWA.

That matters.

 

I see your point, but this was already used against us in that fashion. The phrase is "we have no data to support your contention. Nothing on any surveys." This is coming straight from SWAPA.

 

This makes more sense to me. We have no data to support your contention...so we're going to do what ever we want.

If you have something to say, say it. Otherwise, keep quiet. Kinda like voting...

Not filling out a survey to make a point proves nothing.

 

Yes.

Current Acting Director, NMB Office of Mediation Services, John Livingood has an awesome site with several RLA-specific pages. I'd start with his RLA Conundrums page. That was was where I first heard of the "book-away phonemena," which is sad. SWAPA ought to send alll pilots monthly mailers explaining it to them. But they don't.

It wasn't until very recently that any SWAPA rep or exec started publicly pointing to the idea of the power of the book-away phenomena that the RLA can create for us versus decsribing the RLA as "sugar in our gas tank." IMO, the rep who said that ought to be recalled esp after the railroads just got done completely discrediting that hypothesis.

Our former president also ought not be allowed anywhere near a negotiation process again after his shocking display of RLA ignorance on TOF a couple of weeks ago.

Another excellent resource is the Google Scholar search "Case Law" feature. That's where I discovered that mediators can lie to us and threaten us as a tactic to spur negotiations - another critical piece of information I'd never heard from SWAPA. It's also where I learned about "good faith bargaining" and that we're not required by law to give something up in order to get something. Again, that's nearly the opposite of what I've heard from SWAPA since I've been here.

It's almost as if SWAPA a) hasn't read relevant case law and are oblivious to what the courts have to say about this very important topic, or b) don't want us to know what the courts have to say.

Hopefully, this current SWAPA is starting to get it. Fingers crossed.

The above - Livingood's site and the Google Scholar case law search function - are two excellent places to start.

 

Thank you for all of that, I will certainly check them out.

 

Also, to add to my above post, here's an important legal opinion to read: Presidential Authority to Extend Deadline for Submission of an Emergency Board Report Under the Railway Labor Act.

Back in the early 90's, the first President Bush wanted to know if he could extend or create a second Presidential Emergency Board (PEB) in a labor dispute that was under way. So he asked one of his deputy attorney generals to give him a legal interpretation on the issue.

The bottom line: the President CANNOT unilaterally extend a PEB or create a second PEB. Note that there is a specific subsection of the RLA (9A) that does allow the above for commuter railroads only. It doesn't apply to airline or other railroad disputes.

This is important because I have heard time and again here at SWA that leveraging the RLA is pointless because the President will "just shut us down," and remove our ability to strike. I have personally heard this claim from SWAPA reps and an exec. It's another point of critical ignorance and/or purposeful misinformation that has caused our pilot group to not exploit the most powerful leverage available to us.

The above myth likely arose from the 1997 American Airlines pilot strike when President Clinton established a PEB a few minutes into their strike. Pilots and management ended up settling their dispute approximately a month into their PEB, so they never went back on strike.

To be clear, the President can only delay a strike via a PEB by sixty days. That is all he or she gets. Had the American pilots not settled their dispute by the end of the PEB, Clinton couldn't have stopped them from going back on strike.

In my opinion, that sixty days of additional delay created by a PEB can work in our favor because it gives the book-away phenomena that much more time to apply pressure on management.

 

Its fascinating information you are posting and the ignorance is not limited to SWAPA, it seems pervasive in the industry as a whole, most likely due to misinformation or just not caring.

My question is why would a union like SWAPA want to not use these things? I mean there are only two options, they are intentionally not using these resources due to some outside motivation or they are ignorant of them. I am not sure which is worse to be honest. I am new here and not knocking SWAPA or any of the volunteers, just trying to make sense of it all.

 

Paid off? How else could you possibly explain it?

 

Article from the Wall Street Journal today is pasted below:

The cliff notes, for the lazy readers:
-Strikes are becoming far more common
-Labor has far more leverage than usual due to tight labor market (which is even tighter for pilots!)
-In the recently averted railway worker strike, labor got the best possible outcome by escalating their impasse to the national level. Those who say the RLA puts labor at the disadvantage don’t understand how it works.

We need much more aggressive union leadership, and we need it quickly. It seems clear that we as pilots will not get a better opportunity to restore our contract, possibly for many many years.

Wall Street Journal 16Sep
Strikes Becoming More Common Amid Inflation, Tight Labor Market

There were 180 strikes in the first six months of 2022, according to Cornell University researchers

More workers across a range of industries are going on strike, seeking pay raises to catch up to inflation while the tight labor market has taken away some of the risk of walking off the job.

In the past few weeks, thousands of teachers in Ohio and Washington, nursing-home workers in Pennsylvania and mental-health therapists in California have walked picket lines after contract negotiations broke down over wages and other issues. Other workers have held daylong walkouts as they try to unionize coffee shops, distribution centers and other workplaces.

There were 180 strikes involving roughly 78,000 workers in the first six months of this year, up from 102 involving 26,500 workers in the same period a year earlier, according to a strike tracker created by researchers at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

More unions and employers are also entering into tough contract deliberations, with the potential for strikes looming. Workers’ demands include higher pay to account for inflation as well as better conditions, reflecting how the pandemic has reshaped jobs and many people’s attitudes about their work.

This past week, a tentative deal brokered by the Biden administration averted a strike of railroad workers that had been set to begin Friday, largely over scheduling and work-life balance issues. A strike would have disrupted swaths of the economy, from mining and agriculture to commuter rail service. The agreement, yet to be approved by the unions, would provide a 24% pay increase over five years.

“As long as the job market remains good and people can find jobs and inflation is high, there’s less risk for going out on strike,” said Arthur Wheaton, director of labor studies at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

After additional work stoppages this summer, the total number of strikes this year has grown to 267.

That includes 72 walkouts at coffee shops owned by Starbucks Corp. and nine at Amazon.com Inc. facilities, amid an uptick in union organizing campaigns this year.

For employers, the combination of high inflation, running at an 8.3% pace in August, and national unemployment of 3.7% is putting more pressure on labor negotiations.

In the tight labor market, when hiring is difficult and turnover is high, companies also face questions about how much they can increase wages to meet workers’ expectations when the threat of a recession is looming, said Michael Lotito, co-chairman of the Workplace Policy Institute at Littler, a law firm that represents employers during contract negotiations.

“This is a very, very contentious time,” he said. “It’s pretty damn difficult to figure out what you’re going to agree to.”

Mr. Lotito said he thinks many unions will now look to the wage increases in the tentative railroad agreement as a measure of successful bargaining. “I think that is going to embolden unions to ask for more,” he said.

He and others also say emotions are running high among many workers after more than two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, because their jobs got harder or more dangerous, or because they don’t feel that they got the respect they deserved from employers.

Those frustrations are especially evident in the healthcare sector, where the pandemic took an emotional toll on nurses and others.

This week in Minnesota, more than 15,000 nurses at 13 hospitals in Minneapolis-St. Paul and Duluth went on strike for three days seeking a wage increase of 30% over three years. They returned to work without resolving the contract dispute.

In Pennsylvania, 700 nursing-home workers employed by three companies ended a week-long strike on Tuesday. The union, SEIU Healthcare Pennsylvania, walked away with average raises of 9% in the first year, up to 18% by the end of the three-year contract. Pay for some starting positions rose to $17 an hour from $13. The union also won nurse-to-patient ratios it had sought.

Shelley Robinson, a certified nursing assistant at a nursing home in Lancaster, Pa., said she would get a raise in the first year of $2.75 an hour from her current pay of just over $20 an hour.

Ms. Robinson, who said she cares for up to 30 patients at a time, recalled how Covid “swept like wildfire” through her facility two years ago. She also said she has seen her weekly grocery bill for herself and her two children climb $50 this year.

“This increase was necessary for us,” she said.

Representatives of the companies couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

More than 2,000 mental-health therapists in California and Hawaii have been on strike for a month at healthcare system Kaiser Permanente. The union says it will accept pay increases of 4% in the first year of the contract and 3% in the second and third years. But it says it wants Kaiser to cut the time it takes patients to schedule appointments, which the union says can take eight weeks or more in some cases.

Union Organizing on the Rise, But It’s Not Your Parents’ Union

“People can’t provide the care that’s needed,” said Sal Rosselli, president of the National Union of Healthcare Workers, whose members have been picketing in Sacramento, Fresno and Oakland as temperatures surpassed 100 degrees on some days.

A Kaiser spokesman said it has addressed workers’ top concerns about pay and workloads and that the strike never needed to take place because both sides had been making progress.

“It is time for this strike to end,” the spokesman said. “We have sincerely listened to our therapists’ priorities and responded to the demands of their union representatives.”

The surge in strikes this year has yet to reach the levels seen in 2018 when there were massive teachers strikes in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and other states. That year, more than 500,000 teachers and other workers went on strike, according to a Cornell researcher.A long-running strike of 1,100 miners at an Alabama coal mine that started on April 1, 2021, also has shown no signs of being resolved.The unemployment rate was 3.7% in August. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said unemployment was at a 50-year low of 3.5%. (Corrected on Sept. 16)

 

Thanks for sharing that article. Much appreciated.

100% agreed that we need much more aggressive union leadership that both leverages the RLA (something we've never effectively done before here at SWA) and leverages the times we are living in. The article you quoted does a great job of explaining some of those factors.

The railroad dispute that just wrapped up (pending the ratification vote) ought to be intensively studied by all unions, especially RLA-governed unions. The railroad unions, unafraid of and "unconfused" by (to coin a term) the RLA, exploited the economic weapons made available to them by the RLA with brilliant execution and timing. The political environment, approaching the mid-term elections with a famously pro-union President, Democratic control of the House and Senate, and a Democratic majority on the NMB, favored labor for the first time in years.

And the economic situation, with supply chain and labor shortages as well as spiking inflation, all amplified the threat posed by the possibility of 100,000+ rail workers walking off the job.

The rail unions gave us all a master class in how to employ the RLA. We could learn a lot from them. The RLA isn't slanted against labor. It's slanted against the less educated and the more fearful side.

Right now, we're the terrified, knees-knocking eight-year old kid sporting arm floaties falling off the low board into the pool. If we want gold, we've got to graduate to triple-flipping off the ten meter platform with no splash into the water below.

We can't be afraid and we've got to know what we're doing if we want to come out on top for ourselves, our families, and our profession. We've got a long way to go.