I don't think anyone is getting blackballed that goes to work for Freedom, but Freedom was formed as a separate Mesa carrier to serve airlines that wanted to get around labor contracts and scope clauses.
Now if they were paying industry standard wages, it wouldn't be so bad, but the top level RJ-90 captain is going to be making appreciably less money than a similarly sized aircraft at other airlines.
What's scary about flying for a non-union carrier is that you have
zero protections. If they want you to fly a broken aircraft and you refuse, you might as well pack up your flight kit and turn in your ID. You have
no recourse.
*The following
did not occur at Delta Air Lines*
For example, I know a guy who was being pushed to fly VFR into an airport that had no operating control tower and the weather was 500 foot overcast with no functional IFR approach because the NAVAID was down. The flight was diverted to another airport (serviced by the same airline) with an fully functional instrument approach and they landed in 1/2 vis with blowing snow after a successful ILS approach.
Good judgement? I'd think so. But a 19 year old ramper said that the weather didn't look as bad as the flight service reported and they could have probably spiraled down over the airport and visually picked up the rotating beacon.
Guess what, the crew got called into the chief pilots office and severely reprimanded for not flying VFR into the airport, based solely on what a non-pilot ramper's observations were and luckily since they had a bunch of "atta boys", they weren't going to be terminated as they previously planned to.
True story. And there's more!