If unions are no longer necessary, why does your airline spend money to be part of a union... They are called the ATA and RAA.... so please tell me again why you are so knowledgeable...

 

As a Detroit area native and seeing the downfall of the auto industry and the city its interesting how diehard some people are for unions. I am not for or against unions in the airline industry but you have to admit that UNIONS especially in our industry (like the auto industry) can be PART OF THE PROBLEM. I came across this quote in the recent TIME article on the demise of Detroit..... Think this fits to our industry... plus its a great read...

(Detroit's Future: Will Once Great American City Recover? - TIME)


"Detroit fell victim not to one malign actor but to a whole cast of them. For more than two decades, the insensate auto companies and their union partners and the elected officials who served at their pleasure continued to gun their engines while foreign competitors siphoned away their market share. "

"The UAW had once been the most visionary of American unions. As early as the 1940s, UAW president Walter Reuther was urging the auto companies to produce small, inexpensive cars for the average American. In 1947 and '48 the union even offered to cut wages if the Big Three would reduce the price of their cars. But by the early 1980s, the UAW had entered into a nakedly self-interested pact with the auto companies. After the union's president joined GM's chief congressional lobbyist to defeat a tougher mileage standard in 1990, the lobbyist declared that "we would not have won without the UAW." It was, he said, "one of the proudest days of my life."

The union really can't be blamed for pushing for fabulous wages and lush benefits for its members — that game required two players, and the automakers knew only how to say yes. But the union leadership's fatal mistake was insisting that workers with comparable skills and comparable seniority be paid comparable wages, irrespective of who employed them. If a machinist at a prosperous GM deserved $25 an hour, so did a machinist who worked for a barely profitable Chrysler or for a just-holding-its-own supplier plant that made axles or wheels or windshield wipers.

This defiant inattention to market reality not only placed the less healthy firms in peril, but by pricing labor so uniformly high, it also closed off Detroit to any possible diversification of its industrial base. When the automakers' inattention to engineering, style and quality caused them to crash into a wall of consumer indifference, there was no other industry that could step forward and employ workers who would have been thrilled to make even a fraction of what they once earned. Now nearly 1 in 3 Detroit residents is out of work — and not many of the unemployed have a prayer of finding a job anytime soon."

 

The "seniority problem" is only a problem for someone hired at a lower tiered company. Guys hired at ATA/Aloha/Midwest knew that their company pays lousy wages and has bad work rules. Who's problem is that? You should have picked a better company (if you were qualified) so you could have been the lower time copilot. If you are a 15,000 hour Midwest captain, you made some bad decisions. Don't blame the 3,000 regional kid because he made better decisions or just got lucky.....

I've started over a few times in the business and was slinging gear for younger, less experienced pilots. I didn't whine about it, I take responsibility for my decisions....

 

I must take issue with this - as a former ATA pilot, I had pretty decent work rules, industry leading vacation rules, and decent compensation. When you factored our compensation against the days worked, we probably did close to as well as anyone out there (maybe not industry leading, but in the middle of the pack). I knew of numerous captains who worked less than half the month and earned close to or north of $200K per year.

I'm not blaming anyone, but the whole seniority system evolved under very different circumstances than exist today (namely stable airlines in a regulated environment). The system as it currently exists is broken, and I'm not sure how to equitably fix it. We should have instituted a national seniority list back in the Eastern days, but as usual self interest prevailed over the common good, and now here we are (much like SCOPE).

 

Midwest doesn't have any Captains with flight time that low...

 

Gee, you didn't "pick" your companies too well, did you?

 

I missed a few times, I admit it. But I never whined about the inequality of it all. I never whined about the guy that got hired younger than me. The system isn't equal... Make the best decisions you can and stop crying about the lack of fairness...

 

As much as I would like to believe a national list could be implemented, it would likely have to have a "future" start date and would be next to impossible to get everyone to agree to. Look at how badly the Age 65 change was handled.

What might work would be if airline units insisted on langauage that ALPA had back prior to the EAL strike. If a carrier folds, jobs and seniority go with the aircraft. ALPA National claimed they would demand it, but never did. DAL took 727's and DC-9's and the ATL operations, NWA got -9's and USAir took 757's. If they had taken the crewmembers with the jets, in seniority, the jobs and pay would have been preserved and the pilots at the other carriers would not have been harmed.

Duffy was more interested in protecting DAL ALPA and getting rid of their competition. That's fine. But it perpetuated the problem instead of having a leader stand up and do what would have been right and not put us where we are today; each going after the other and management getting the work done for less. The leverage would have been tremendous.

Today we see the same thing. Unfortunately I don't see the leadership with the spine for making the tough decisions in DC. Or Atlanta.

 

+1 for anti union in the current state of affairs. They have not been doing thier jobs for about the last 10-15 years effectively, and need to be re-evaluated. The industry has gone down hill, and the union hasn't been able to stop it. I thought thats what unions were for. I hate to say it, but if wages had been kept at a resonable level, and a few airlines had been allowed to go BK, there would be less competition, and ticket price would have reflected that, the survivors would have been able to pay a decent wage, and the guys on the street hopefully would have been able go back to work with the survivors.

In todays world, there is just too many people who want to have their cake and eat it to, which is one reason why the industry is where it is right now. Pilots at the top with the "I've got mine" attitude, with no regard for those comming in, which lowers the bar one more cycle. Rinse repeat, rinse repeat, rinse repeat, welcome to the year 2009.

Edit: If the union could bring back 1/2 of what the industry was 15 years ago, I'd be pro union. I guess I still kind of am, but there needs to be some new leaders, not loafing free loaders.