StayFrosty

I just want to say it was an honor and an amazing experience to stand shoulder to shoulder with 1300+ of my sweaty, smelly, and hungover brothers and sister. I’ve never been in a union before and never seen anything like this, closest thing being a major military formation and movement. The camaraderie was nothing short of epic. I’m in awe and humbled by what I was able to witness and be a part of. We did LION sh&$.

Back to your regularly scheduled programming…

FL370esq

The one thing to remember is that a TRO/injunction is a remedy in equity (not at law) and, therefore, both parties must come to the Court with clean hands. While I believe the courts would still rule in a company's favor, the companies have certainly changed the status quo with extended reroutes, etc. It isn't the slam dunk that it was for AA and Delta back in '99-'00.

Rolf

It was awesome meeting so many posters from the forums and see it wasn't just all talk. It will be hard to top the turnout for the next one, but I hope we can.
Fight club is a great movie.

Lewbronski

That’s an interesting point.

However, given that our Swiss-cheese CBA is rot through with loopholes (ie, the definition of “irregular operations” and one of the main purposes of the CBA being defined as “further[ing] … the efficiency of operation”), AND given that the prime imperative of the RLA is to avoid an interruption of commerce, it would likely be a difficult argument to make that the company’s hands are not “clean” in the eyes of the law in the context of a dispute over a hypothetical pilot work slow-down.

The company would likely argue reassigning and rerouting pilots is fully compliant with and even demanded by the CBA and also facilitates their duty of performance as mandated by the RLA. They would also likely argue, just like Spirit’s management successfully did in 2017, that immediate injunctive relief is called for to avoid irreparable harm to their business and to the interests of the flying public.

Given historical precedent, a campaign by pilots to not pick up open time or anything similar would easily argued by the company to be in violation of the status quo. It would likely not be difficult to paint the pilots in such a situation as having “unclean” hands and the company as the innocent victim. The court would likely say that the proper venue to challenge the company’s excessive reroutes and reassignments would be via a SBOA and/or by seeking contractual fixes via the Section 6 negotiation process, not by violating the status quo.

FL370esq

All good points The counter might be that historically, pilots who picked up a one-day trip flew a one -day trip and were not extended into day two or three. As a result of this additional, I planned and unprecedented extension, pilots have decided to bypass picking up additional time due to the fatiguing nature of flying extra, unplanned days. 😁

symbian simian

No, it was exactly what I meant. I wasn't very nice.

Lewbronski

Perhaps. This would require a load of convincing data from the Scheduling Research Committee to even have a chance of convincing the court that the company was violating the status quo. Referencing Spirit's case in 2017, maybe SWAPA could even turn the tables on management and provide quotes in their pleadings from social media posts made by individual pilots documenting the extraordinary nature of the reroutes and reassignments.

Even then, SWAPA would likely lose because, as explained in my previous post, of the priority the RLA places on avoiding an interruption to commerce (protecting the interests of the flying public) and because we collectively agreed to the open-ended and "mission-oriented" nature of our CBA that gives the company a near carte blanche to do almost anything they please whenever flights do not "operate in accordance with the published schedule because of circumstances such as weather problems, maintenance delays, cancellations, ATC delays, etc," (the definition of "irregular operations in our CBA) which, as we all know, is A LOT of the time. BTW, what is the definition of "etc" in that definiton? If some sort of pilot work slow-down hampers the ability of the company to conduct commerce by forcing them to delay or cancel flights (harming the interests of the flying public) when we all consented to allow them to do almost anything they want by virtue of our ratification vote of the current CBA, we would likely find ourselves on the short end of the stick. That would be especially true, if say, for example, the company had been forced to cancel or delay flights on the day of and days surrounding the picket because they had the data to indicate a sharp drop off in the picking up of open time AND there were social media posts made on public forums (APC, for example) that could be construed as having had an intimidatory effect on other pilots that dissuaded them from picking up open time.

As an aside, what the court has recently admonished the company for is not appearing to take its duty to bargain with SWAPA in good faith and to exert every reasonable effort to resolve our differences seriously. Where this could help us is down the road, after we have been in mediation for at least a couple of years. If the court has noted an established pattern of a lack of good faith and a failure to exert every reasonable effort on the part of the company in its bargaining posture as they have already begun to, then it could help us to more persuasively make the argument to the NMB that we ought to be released into a cooling-off period. That would dramatically up our leverage against the company and make the prospect of coming to an agreement favorable to SWAPA more likely. This is what the court said in Oct of last year: