From today's atwonline.com news:
<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">ALPA: Airlines have not sold cabotage, foreign ownership
Dateline: Friday June 29, 2001
US-based Air Line Pilots Assn. has opposed deregulation and it has opposed open skies.
The jury still may be out on deregulation, but ALPA President Duane E. Woerth said
the union changed its tune on open skies after airline managements spent a lot of time
and effort with their pilot groups detailing the benefits and minimizing the risks to
pilots. Speaking to a gathering of the International Aviation Club in Washington, D.C., Woerth said this process has not been repeated on the current contentious issues of
cabotage, foreign ownership and seventh freedom: "To my knowledge, not one of those
local [ALPA] leaders has ever been approached to support an airline business plan that included these elements that would require a change in ALPA policy."
The "first threshold" of action to be taken to improve pilot comfort levels is to define the extraterritoriality rights of pilots under the US Railway Labor Act, the ruling pilot labor regulation, Woerth said, noting an early ruling that held that FedEx pilots domiciled in Subic Bay, Philippines, no longer are covered by the RLA. The basic issue, he said, is a lack of parallel international regulation governing labor as it does capital. "As long as labor is trapped inside national boundaries and capital is free to go where it wants, there will be conflict," he declared. "To date, not a single proposal to advance US policy beyond open skies has ever provided or even contemplated real legally binding international law for labor." He predicted that ALPA would lack confidence in labor protection "assurances" in light of the failure of such protection in the deregulation era.</font>
Sounds a bit like the London Underground dispute to me - don't these Luddites realise that there's no such thing as 'labour protection "assurances"' in this day and age?
Wake up and smell the coffee boys - jobs for life have long gone!
As I understand it, the Railway Labor Act was enacted the best part of 200 years ago, in the 19th century. Isn't it just typical of a union to use that sort of contemporary, forward looking legislation as a basis for their actions?
When I skimmed this article the first time, I thought that they might be opposed to the US government's usual 90 degree tilted 'level playing field' apporoach to Open Skies (ie "Open Skies means that we can fly to and through you as often as we like; we can wet lease our aircraft and crews to your airlines; we can have ownership of up to 49% of your airlines. You, on the otherhand, can only fly to gateway cities - unless we determine you to be a Category 2 country, in which case you can't come in at all; you can't wet lease your aircraft to any US carriers; and you can only buy up to 24% of US carriers. Oh, and all US government related people (and there's a lot of those!) have to adhere to the 'Fly America' policy which means you'll not get them as passengers, anyway. Sounds fair? Good! Sign here!"); but no, they want the playing field tilted even
more in their favour - to 180 degrees or so!
Out of interest, what's BALPA's position on Open Skies?
[This message has been edited by The Guvnor (edited 29 June 2001).]