4F4 check this,
Apparently, these two union tops were surprisingly re-elected couple of years ago although they had no chance to be re-elected!
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One of them was highly involved with the flight duty regulations negotiations. Swiss tried to change the previous FDR, which was containing many goodies and inherited from LX time, this top person spend big time hand in hand with Swiss management to persuade the members to accept the degraded FDR.
Against all the odds, the FDR passed.
If this is true it may answer your question:
was it really the first time that the union's top shots cheated???