I would love to go back and read all the posts from 2000 and how all the righteous UAL guys were just going to give away their seniority to the older USair pilots.

Not sure why all the angst with 2005-2008 CAL guys. They are not stealing anything! They have as much control over what happens at the airline as any other pilot does...zero. You show up and bid what you can. Some of you guys act like the junior CAL guys are scaling the Willis Tower at night and writing policy for the airline.

 

The only difference between 2000 and 2013 is merger policy and how it is applied, or spun as one may have it. The issue is the middle ground. Not straight relative seniority in 2000/2013 and not straight longevity in 2000/2013.

 

Wow there is so much here it is difficult to know where to begin. First and foremost you have two groups represented by the same “association" yet the food fight is just beginning and will no doubt soon resemble what we have seen for over seven years at USAir, where of course the next episode of that trilogy is about to explode. Secondly you have someone who believes that earning what we currently earn in our profession is about as good as it gets, even though plumbers, electricians, government administrators, and pharmaceutical salesmen, just to name a few, may do much better than we do and be home almost every night. Finally you have those who want to say that deregulation happened and that there simply isn't anything that we could have done about it then much less today, so just forget about it and move on. What a pathetic, uninformed, short sighted group we have represented here. The only fix for this sorry mess is a real union, something ALPA has never been. You would think that a group of educated professionals would take the time to examine where we are today, how we got here and try to determine how we must change to exit the death spiral we, as a profession, have been in for over three decades. Instead we just keep the turn going adding more aileron and more rudder hoping that by doing what got us into this mess will somehow get us out. Way to much here and there must be a better use of time than trying to get the members of our profession to wake up.

 

+1.........

 

Could not agree with you more. All this bluster about how we let the profession slip away. Funny how I never hear much from Southwest pilots about it slipping away. Then again, when you adapt to the marketplace (a concept many seem to have trouble comprehending), you win. The losers sit around singing "Glory Days."

 

Hope you are not trying to compare cal to Southwest like equal or something - no offense but cal was never in or would be in the same class as SW. Another one waiting on "market forces" to allow himself prosper at the expense of others. Miss being on the special list do you?

 

I don't work for CAL and am not comparing them to SWA. Those "market forcces", and SWA's reaction to them vs. ours over many years, absolutely let them prosper at our expense, don't ya think?

 

So explain to the forum what role the pilots played in this growth post deregulation. The UAL guys fought to preserve as much of the quality of the profession they could and lost on the RJ front.(not even in the picture then). The cal pilot have given in to the "market forces" for over 30 years and didn't fair any better. Collectively we just spent all our bargaining tools/resources/energy to bring the cal pilot up to some semblance of reasonable contract. (They were still working under a Lorenzo imposed 1980's contract).
Please explain how the SW pilots used "market forces" to advance their career. In all 3 cases it was management - the pilots were along for the ride.

 

Do you really think the pilots at SWA have been "along for the ride" for decades and just accidently ended up in the position they are in? There has been a decades long era of cooperation over there between labor and management. SWA management figured out long ago how to keep costs in check while simultaneously keeping the employees on board and still offering a product that the ever expanding customer base has been happy with. Pick any average air fare on that chart above in any economic condition, and SWA figured out how to make money and gain market share. The SWA pilots got to where they are today by getting slow but steady contractual improvements that stayed in line with the company's performance while offering unmatched productivity. Throw in the internet era where the vast majority shop based on ticket price, and SWA became the market maker. The further the chart above went downhill, the more makret share they gained. Econ 101.

 

Short answer is YES! The success of the SW pilots is due to SW management's labor relations policies. The rest of the stuff you speak is a management function and the SW pilots just flew the airplanes - they did what we all did but had better management with a vision. You had either Jeff or Tilton leading you to the promise land and their vision didn't include your success in the process - just expensive labor. Sorry, just the way it is around here - you are labor!