I’m no expert either but I would imagine your not doing a strike vote when progress is being made (I.e TAing sections) in negotiations. If your not Making progress on the most basic No or low cost items, (commuting policy, uniforms, disciplinary, some scheduling sections) and your pretty sure you have a unified group a strike vote can get you some leverage. Assuming you get a high turn out and high % yes.

 

Afaik, the United pilot group isn’t in mediation. Assuming that’s true, there’s zero possibility they could “move to strike,” because there’s no chance the NMB would release them from mediation (which is a requirement under the RLA to eventually strike) to a cooling-off period because they aren’t even in mediation right now. Once they’re in mediation, they’d have to be in mediation for a minimum of two or three years before the NMB might consider releasing them.

 

Suits must love 5 year contracts that go on for 10 years with basically 6 months of differential back-pay. We should be going into mediation and having strike votes within 90 days of an amendable date. This needs to happen immediately after the last contractual raise, not 3 years after. That it takes 3 years for an NMB release is all the more reason. We need to start the process now because it should have happened 3 years ago. The TA in the pipeline is nothing more than a delay tactic until ratification. I say so what if there's progress. It's progress that should have been made in 2018 to be ready for the 2019 amendable date. Do the strike vote now. Let's get the ball rolling. We can worry about this silly TA later.

 

So...you make a post that shows how little you understand the RLA, get called out, then double down on the nonsense lol. Well played 🤣

 

Yep.

But I bet suits love even more the fact that pilots almost entirely lack an understanding of how the RLA works and how it can be leveraged to their advantage. It’s a major enabling factor in allowing the suits to repeatedly get away with that sort of thing. Because pilots don’t understand the RLA, they don’t pressure their MEC’s to properly use the RLA. In fact, I bet a lot of MEC representatives themselves don’t have a firm handle on the RLA.

For example, I’ve talked to several pilots whose comment on the Alaska pilots’ strike authorization vote was something like, “I have tickets on Alaska this summer. I better buy some backup tickets on another airline,” or, “I hope they’ve got their strike funds built up,” without realizing that it’s a near impossibility that Alaska will actually go on strike this summer because of how little time they’ve spent in mediation. All of that implies a gross misunderstanding of how the RLA works.

Or other examples: how many pilots think entering mediation is a terrible idea? How many pilots don’t understand the difference between mediation and arbitration? How many pilots think the President can stop us from striking forever? How many pilots think once we enter mediation, we can never get out without capitulating? How many think the mediator has unlimited power? How many think if we don’t come to an agreement during mediation, we’ll be forced to accept an arbitrated agreement? How many pilots don’t realize that to pose the threat of a strike and the “book-away” phenomena that goes along with it, we’ve got to spend a bunch o’ time in mediation?

 

i fully admit that I don’t know the details of the RLA. But it will probably do wonders if folks get scared of a possible strike and bookings go down. That will probably have an immediate impact on the suits.

 

It’s certainly possible Alaska management knew mediated talks were coming and tried to get ahead of the curve and filed when certain (pro management) mediators were on the calendar. We (f9 alpa) filed with that in mind a few years ago.

 

We won’t actually get to see the language due to it being presumptively voted down.

 

What? Do you have some inside info? Or are you just APCing?

 

Yep, that could be. I agree.