Remember though, that according to the LEC nominees that Mesaba was better at handling grievances as evidenced by their grievance list vs ours.
Number of grievances unresolved, that's a good place to begin. You could also have a long talk about work ethic. What's worse was the culture.
The MEC really didn't have to take away the whole grievance process until the children in Memphis let hundreds (600? I can get the number) expire because they were too busy on the Memphis golf course, drinking downtown, or just sleeping in all day watching Netflix (I'm assuming). A lot of those people, XJ people, who are used to being paid (because our grievance volunteers
WORKED) are still here and some still volunteer because they were so disgusted by the laziness and lying that went on those days. I had one 9E clown tell me that I sure as hell wasn't going to get block or better because "it's just cheap to make them pay that." I believe he was shoved over to P2P afterwards, due to my complaints in part, and I know there were others.
You see, you're trying to pass off the facts as happenstance. You believe you had the worst management, period. No one- NO ONE- could deal with the red neck circus! It's impossible! If you guys couldn't get it done, no one could! PHHHT, someone shoot me. No one even tried to get it done, it was easier to duck the work and pretend it never happened. Just make sure you have someone to blame when you get caught.
There's an advance course XJ guys could have taught 9E on taking those unresolved grievances and trading them in for bargaining power, but why listen to us? Besides, you have to actually file the damn grievance as a requisite to even sit in the class and I already know that what too much God damn work.
Really, it's not hard to see why our grievance list was smaller by a couple orders of magnitude. If you just get in there and TRY you'd be amazed how much success you can have. ALPA's got courses on it and everything.
Who cares really, right? It's just money. The 9E guys were swimming in it, clearly. That's why they botched TA1 and got themselves parked by the NMB; they didn't need a pay raise. Take 15-45 minutes to process a grievance?... That sure is a lot of drinking time. But what if the pilots find out? Blame it on NMB and company conspiracies (*making ghost and bogey men sounds*)! Blame it on those XJ guys and how easy they had it with MAIR and the scamruptcy! Blame it on Bloch, Colgan, XJ, the weather, Martians, why? Because our membership doesn't do a lot of critical thinking.
The committee was fixed by putting in some XJ folks that had experience, wanted to work for their pilots, and (most of all)
didn't care about XJ vs 9E.
XJ ALPA negotiated and started their tenure at 9E under the assumption that the 9E management was as cooperative as theirs.
We weren't used to dealing with the illiterate, that's true. There were more problems though. Management, of course, was slow and stupid with grievances because they'd never really had to put up with any diligence from the other side of the table.
Doesn't really matter how intransigent management is, as long as the grievance people do their job you can stack 1,000's of grievances on top of one another because they are all still valid. I had a bunch in the middle of the stack.
Then? Choo-Choo- the BK train is a' coming. No more meeting on grievances because Meenke won't be able to keep the doors open. HOWEVER, as long as the volunteer behind the computer does his/her job, and the company doesn't liquidate, you'll still get some of your money. AS. I. DID. Someone on the other side has to do the job, because when your stupid airline finally comes out of BK and is sold, all those past debts (*ding ding ding ding* this is where ALL that volunteer hard work comes in) have to be paid. BONUS! Of course, if the airline goes tits up and liquidates, you ain't getting any money hunny.