Yes as of yesterday we had the numbers in the House of Representatives, however, I think that we are still a bit short of republicans in the Senate and for this to work, we must have a majority in both houses. As was shown though a couple of years ago when we had another bill that made it through both houses to ward of being privatized, that when the two bills went to conference committee, the administration did something very much out of the norm and forced the ranking majority to change the language of the bill (which is NOT supposed to happen) to make it much more palatable to the President...
I hope that we prevail on this, but considering we are one of the smallest unions around, we are fighting a very uphill battle. The govt. has most everything on their side, including the fact that most folks don't care about folks who make a very good salary by most standards. The funny part is that the FAA keeps making it sound like we are demanding a raise when in actuallity all we are requesting is status quo... At the end of negotiations, the agency had not budged off of thier initial demand for close to 2 Billion in give backs. We had gotten to the point of 1.4 billion in consesstions, but that wasn't enough for them... <shrug> Our administrator thinks that we are all greedy and there is no way that we would just take our option to retire and give up all that wonderful money. I have news for her, a lot of us have planned for retirement and would have stuck around for a bit because we love the job. Make it so that you dread coming in and then suffer a pay cut on top of it, WHY STAY???? She doesn't get it, she thinks that we are indebted to HER and that we just can't leave...
sigh
Scott