Lab Rat

"Forced" isn't the right word for a situation like this. A person is where they are out of choice. Given, their other career/job alternatives may be limited based on their level of skill/education, but unless we're talking indentured servitude nobody is forced to remain anywhere - it is by choice.

And this is the reason why...
I would wager that no other career has a workforce with such a limited demand of work and an unlimited supply of qualified labor - and the supply willing to work for practically free.

Mason32

Very well said. This particular group of pilots has proven repeatedly that they will not stand up for the profession.... has consitently lowered the bar... to the point of sleeping on the airplane so the company wouldn't have to get hotel rooms... GMAFB... People can crap all over Eagle, but the fact remains that they are the only regional pilot group with a no-strike, no job action clause preventing them from seeking immediate self help... do I agree with that clause being in the contract; nope and I never voted for it... but the two big prices paid for getting a single pilot list among all four airlines running as Eagle at the time was; 1 - a sixteen year contract, and 2 - the no strike clause.

Along those lines, if four seperate airlines can form a single pilot list, then so can all ALPA airlines. What are we as a collective group willing to give them to get it?

From what I can see, over the past 12 of the 16 years... most regionals have at least tried to keep up with Eagle, it just took many of them the past 12 years to do it... and now that they are here, they want to joke about Eagles contract? One or two regionals even were able to get a few things here or there that are ahead of Eagles contract, pay or work rules... but most still are very lacking....after 12 years that is.

The rest of the industry has no such no strike and no self help clause... so what is the excuse then?

ALPA national needs to form a committee, with a rep from each ALPA carrier and work on a standard ALPA contract to cover ALL ALPA pilots, regardless of carrier... then direct each and every MEC that when at ammendment rounds, or full section 6 talks, they are not authorized to accept anythign less than the ALPA baseline contract... eventually, when each airline has a virtually identical contract a national seniority list will be much easier to come by.

lastly, scope sections need to be much more detailed than they currently are, and expanded upon... not only to protect your current flying, but to prohibit you being used to fly another ALPA pilots flying....

Lots of small little changes, but the direction needs to come from National, and right now, the people in charge are more interested in bolstering membership to increase revenue than really attacking what is wrong with the industry... just look at how fast the Railroad Laws got changed after one train wreck... and that was due to cell phone use, not lack of rest... but rest rules were re-written within a few months.... you can not tell me that after all these years ALPA, ALPA-PAC, could not have forced this issue? ALPA needs a complete overhaul from the top, right down to each and every MEC/LEC member. Much like out US Congress that was completely asleep the past few years and allowed this financial mess to continue to the mess we have today. 545 elected people in DC failed their responsibility, and not one single incumbant should ever be re-elected next time... they are to blame for this mess... likewise, ALPA has been a huge failure under the present and past leaders... the rhetoric sounds great, but has no follow through.

Oh, and as much as I'd hate to do it... I would give MESA their national seniority number (if we ever got to that point) I wouldn't like it, but they haven't been much worse than RAH and Peanuckle or any of the others...

The old saying is that there is strength in numbers... an analogy from ancient fortress builders... the more rows of bricks, blocks and walls the stronger the fortress wall was... the problem is, in our case, some of the bricks, stones and blocks were never formed correctly, and are very weak structurally... causing everything built above them to be in risk of collapse.

end rant

Nevets

There will always be a Mesa. Just remember that your airline is one management group away from being the next Mesa. If we can institute some sort of seniority portability into the profession you solve the problem rather than just the symptom as your approach would do.

You have to start somewhere. Some airline is always going to be at the bottom of the rung when/if this is instituted. You have to include everyone for this to work, including Mesa regardless of what you think of them or their management.

The collective group will have to give something up to get this. I think it would take a strike to get it but maybe an approach like your airline did may work. The bigger thing pilots will have to give up is the possibility of someone senior being able to come over with their aircraft if your airline gets them. To me that is a no brainer as I would benefit from that ability if it was my airline losing the aircraft. Eventually it becomes a wash in pilot cost for managements to do this since they would not have the benefit of first year pay pilots being hired to fly those aircraft.

As for current contracts and how they got what they have or don't have, its irrelevant as far as seniority portability is concerned. The point is that we need to get this done regardless in order to end whipsaw and pilots competing against pilots. Once you solve that problem you can start working on fixing the symptom of weak contracts because you will have leverage to do it with.

ALPA is actually working on this directly on two fronts. They have created a committee to come up with a methodology of coming up with an industry wide seniority list protocol. ALPA has also created the Fee for Departure Work Group which is made up of all regional carriers MECs. It is working on contract standards that include seniority migration mechanisms to end pilot recylcing. I think these are good starts. But there must be pressure to keep it going. The railroad analogy is not fair. There were fatal accidents that caused those recent changes. The FAA has a lot of history in regards to regulations written in blood. Its unfortunate that it may take a large fatal accident to change our rest rules. When there is pressure, things are done and that is why we need to keep the pressure on this seniority issue.

milky

Seriously? Grow up. You are spouting off about stuff in which you obviously have had no education. Airline unions along with other unions like UAW and education unions have had major hands in destroying the industries upon which they rely. The airlines less so because the pilots have wisely taken concessions in order to keep their jobs and companies viable so far. Even so, the market value of your labor is dropping daily.

A NSL is absolutely a pipe dream that would only hurt your career even more than your seniority-based unions have already done.

milky

Finally somebody else that understands that you always have the right to leave your company. You can even leave the flying industry altogether. Oh, you don't want to? Neither do your peers. Guess what that means: There is a market price for your labor. It's the current price or possibly even less because you are willing to stay and work for that price. Oh, you'll claim that you are going to strike or quit. Until enough of your peers quit or stop showing up by the thousands with application in hand when a new job opens, then it will stay the same.

I guess I can say that I'm actually helping your cause because thus far, I have decided not to transition to part 121 flying because I value my personal worth too much to just be lumped in as a seniority number among the masses. I guess if enough people leave and stop showing up like me, then there will be an increase in wages.

One last thing, all you regional guys that point the finger at everybody else for being willing to work for peanuts really need to take a good hard look in the mirror. If you joined a regional in the past 6 or so years (or possibly farther back than that), you are part of the problem. You have just now figured it out. I'm sure you thought you were a great pilot when your regional offered you a new job in the right seat of an airplane when you showed up with less than 1000 hours of total time. Hey, I have 500 (or heaven forbid, 300) hours, I'm exactly what this industry needs. I'll just get my foot in the door here, and I'm sure I'll be making hundreds of thousands of dollars in just a couple years.

Bond

Doesn't this contradict what you were saying earlier in the thread about how if you have a good contract with iron curtains management can't pull a mesa?

The bottom line is that anything in a contract can be thrown out in court in a bankruptsy case (yes I know, ALPA is working on it!) gamble #1. Anyone can raise the capital and open an airline, a non union airline, and there goes the flying, how about skywest? No union, what would keep the majors from just dumping a bunch of flying to those guys, gamble #2. Alter-ego's anyone? How about management pulling a gojets by throwing a contract out by means of either of the above.

Sorry until this is a "bullet proof plan" I'm not voting on it, and I along with a couple thousand at my company will vote ALPA off property if that's what it takes to kill this; and for the record I'm as pro-ALPA as they come!!!

Nevets

How do you explain the longshoremen or SAG then?

Let me clarify. There will always be poor contracts until we do something about it. And I submit that what the Fee for Departure Work Group is doing would go a long way in solving that problem.

What they are working on is contract standards and a mechanism to take your seniority with you if your airline loses its aircraft to another airline. This could be worded so that it would also be forced upon any carier regardless of their union or if they are non-union, just as the XJT scope clause would have forced Skywest to integrate. Alter egos, like I said, are being solved with new scope clauses as contracts are becoming amendable. The Canadian regionals already have this and it works great for them. They've made it so that the benefits were good enough that all their pilots agreed to go along with it and benefit from it as well. This is something that we should strive for in order to entice the non-union pilots to participate as well

First we have to agree that seniority is used against us and that the ability to not have to start at first year pay at a new airline would be good for pilots. Once we agree on that we can continue talking about how to go about solving those problems. I think that what the Fee for Departure Work Group is doing is a start. The national seniority list would be the next step. Both have their problems in implementation but that is no reason to not try to make things better.

I think that as pilots educate themselves on the benefits of seniority transportability outweighing any potential near term sacrifices, you will see the momentum for what the Fee for Departure Work Group increase. Especially when we can point to a working model from Canada. People are seem reluctant to this type of change and I think that is the only thing that will cause this to not happen but I personally don't see a couple thousand pilots at my company voting ALPA out over it.

Bond

Respectfully, the Canadian market is a much smaller scale, the same principal cannot be applied to a marked that is about 15 times bigger and more complex. You still haven't address the possibility of anyone say someone like Needleman opening a non-union carrier. What keeps say Continental from using a non-union company that complies with their scope clause i.e. 50 seat jets? Nevets, there is just too many holes and it's not going to happen, I am not willing to sacrifice anything for something that can be circumvented by management. Oh and by the way, if you think management at any airline major or otherwise, are going to back themselves into a corner by agreeing to provisions keeps them from using who ever they want for their feed, you're dreaming!

The time to unite the work force under one list came and went in the 90's, and take a wild guess who opposed it the most?!?!?! United!!! The guys pushing for it the most now, were the guys telling everyone to stuff it back then. Well friends, if this trully could benefit everyone without the possibility of management destroying it, I would gladly go along with it, but there are no possible guarantees that this will work, and ALPA cannot guarantee that this will work, so no thanks.

Nevets, I think I know who you are, you were a rep in the west coast that likes to be very vocal about his political views on our pipe. You should know that there are about 50 guys at our company ralling a proposal to teamsters, in the event our union tries to push this on us.....the system we have is not perfect, but it doesn't gamble with any ones career progression.

mooney

Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but what's the big deal about being the only regional with a no strike/no self help clause? All airlines basically have that anyways in the form of the RLA. Hence all the 5+ year negotiations (ASA, Pinnacle).

On a side note, what's your beef with Pinnacle pilots? You do realize they were one of the "wholly-owned" darlings you love to preach about? Is it the pilot's fault that NWA sold them? Should I have quit and gone to somewhere else and lost 4 years seniority when we went public? What would you do if Eagle got spun off?

FliFast

I remember watching the Florida Gulf (MESA) pilots flying our-Allegheny Commuter-routes while every one of our First Officers received furlough notices.