[jtrain609]

Word holmes, bro here's spot on.

Warren Buffet has said that anything with high labor costs in this country will be moved out as soon as it possibly can to places where lower labor costs are available. If you can't move the products production (in this case, our flying) out of the country, there better be a really good reason for the production sticking around here, and even still market forces will force wages down.

We haven't even begun to see how little folks will fly mainline airplanes for, either. I think we've got a pretty good idea of what pilots will fly RJ's for, and we're at it. Now that we've proven we can and WILL fly jets for $40,000 in the right seat and $80,000 a year in the left seat, there's nothing to stop wages from being forced to an equilibrium point based around those wages at the upper end.

Years ago some VERY smart folks on this forum were yelling and screaming about how we took Metroliner pay rates and extended them up to get our current RJ rates instead of taking 737 rates and extending them down. We'll never get those 737 rates back, and again; market forces will continue to force wages down until we start crashing airplanes because all the qualified pilots out there are gone.

Further, we're not a real union. The longshoremen have a real union. Plumbers have real unions, as do electricians. If we had a real union, we'd be employed by the union and contracted out by our airlines to do our work. We'd get our health insurance from the union and we'd get our retirement from the union.

And Todd, I'd love to hear how you think we've actually beaten back management in the last 15 years AND HELD ONTO THE GAINS. We haven't made any gains, we've only slowed down managements progress. Without the union the degregation of our career would be much faster, but all we're doing is slowing down the downward spiral instead of preventing it and turning it backwards. We talk about taking it back, but we'll take a concessionary contract to keep our jobs when our companies are mismanaged and shrug and say, "Well I'd rather lose 5% than lose my job!" It's just that after a couple of those, you didn't lose 5%, you lost 50% (ala Delta).

I'm not saying this because of the downward trend that's happening in the industry, or because of my furlough. Ya'll think I'm some bitter old coot, but that couldn't be any further from the truth. I have my eyes wide open, and I'm seeing what's happening in this industry. Since deregulation we've had a series of cycles and every time the industry dips, we never regain what we once had. While things will get better and worse, the overall trend of that sine wave will be a downward trend unless we can do some things to truly arrest the free fall we're in. We haven't been able to do it since 1982, and I doubt we'll be able to do it in the next 10 years.