I was deadheading out to Los Angeles a while back. Thankfully my contract allows for a first class ticket on deadheads over a certain length so I wasn’t subjected to the joys of riding back in steerage.
I was enjoying the luxury of not having my legs to to sleep when I got into a conversation with the person sitting next to me. Now normally I tend to keep to myself but he wanted to talk and it was a long flight. I had no idea the conversation would get so “interesting”.
I’d place him in his mid 30s. Looked a bit like Matthew McConaughey. Turns out he lived in Los Angeles and was in real estate. Not just any real estate mind you, but high-end homes, of which there are no shortage in LA. He claimed to have made (and lost) a lot of money selling homes.
Showed me pictures of his Bentley. Nice car. Wouldn’t want to pay the maintenance on one. The Jag I used to drive was bad enough. Still, I was impressed. A Bentley stands out even in car-jaded Los Angeles.
So far so good. He seemed like a nice enough sort. Then he noticed my pilot union lanyard attached to my airline ID.
“What’s that?” - he asked.
“It’s our airline pilot’s union. The two people flying us to LA are probably members.”
I might as well have said: “That’s the local Communist Party chapter” or “The National Association of Puppy Shooters”.
Oh boy. Heeeeeeere we go!
He apparently didn’t like unions one bit, and started out on a tirade against them.
Oh great, he’s one of those. I don’t recall asking his opinion on this subject but I was sure getting an earful of it. How many more hours until we get to LA?
Not really sure what his problem was. Maybe some Teamster kicked his dog when he was a kid?
I pointed out that my airline actually had been non union until sometime around 1996, long before I was hired there. As it was explained to me, that lasted until management went back on some promises they’d made to the pilot group.
Instead of a contract, back then they had something called the “Pilot’s Handbook”. The handbook listed what the company could and could not make you do. So far so good except the company could change the handbook at will — and they did.
The pilots decided that promises weren’t worth the paper they were printed on and voted in a union.
Now I will be the first to admit I was never “Joe Union”. I had spent many years in the military and then worked in the IT sector. Unions were kind of an alien concept to me. Having been in this job for over a decade now, I can see the advantage of having one.
The union gives me at least a small degree of protection from some very large, powerful entities. God forbid the company or worse the Feds should ever have reason to come after me. If it ever happens at least I’ll have a union lawyer next to me if I find myself standing in front of that long table with all the microphones on it.
I work in a seniority based system. Your date of hire determines when you get to upgrade, what trips you can hold, and even when you get vacation. It’s not a perfect system. It can be downright maddening at times. Pilots tend to be Type-A overachievers for the most part and we don’t like being told “wait your turn”. Still, I can’t think of a better way to do it in this kind of business.
My seatmate pointed out that we should upgrade based on merit rather than seniority.
“We’re all trained to the same standard”, I replied. “You can’t have an unqualified pilot flying an airliner.”
“But you must know some who are better than others!”
The problem with that is, how do you define “better”? The person who’s willing to fly the broken airplane? The person who will fly through a line of thunderstorms to get somewhere?
It’s not like sales. Sales is very easy to quantify. The best salesperson is the one shipping truckloads of refrigerators to Nome Alaska. Flying is different. My idea of what’s good may not be the same as management’s idea of good.
That’s usually how it’s worked at places that have tried merit-based upgrades. Management wants the planes to move and they’ll promote the people that move the airplanes.
That worries me about some of the non-seniority airlines like Emirates. They’ll hire you on a contract basis for x number of years. At the end of that contract, they may or may not renew it. That gives management a pretty big stick to hold over your head. Toe the line or you won’t be asked to stay.
Our contract protects us from that. We can only be let go for cause.
Now there are some safeguards built in to weed out any bad apples. If you can’t pass the training, you won’t upgrade. You’re either qualified or you’re not. Bust three training events and you’re gone. We have people who will never move to the left seat because they can’t pass the training.
Yes, the union is about getting us the best deal possible from the company but it’s also about safety. A lot of the safety equipment we have today, like airborne weather radar, was pushed for by the pilot’s unions. A lot of the work rules we have that limit how far I can be pushed were negotiated by the union. I consider the 2% of my salary I pay in dues to be an investment.
At this point all he had left was: “But unions stifle creativity!”
OK, I’ve had about enough of this. Apparently he can’t grasp the concept that what I do is not quite the same as selling real estate. I guess selling million-dollar houses makes him think he can tell me how my industry should be run. Time to finish this.
Sir, it’s not about creativity. It’s about me not putting 300,000 pounds of screaming metal and jet fuel into your neighborhood at 3:00 AM because I’m too fucking tired to do my job.