While I would not encourage anyone to resign from balpa, I can't help feeling there are a lot of us out there who are members because we feel morally obliged to but are really quite dissatisfied.
There are already some posts here which reflect my views and I bet the views of many others. We pay a lot of money for professional representation which is not really forthcoming.
The company council or plc members are generally all cast in the same mould so while their intentions may be applauded (sometimes), they are volunteers generally out of their league when it comes to dealing with management who they often regard as incompetent but are usually successful in keeping us in our place. When you do criticise, the response is generally to invite you to do better.
If I look at the balpa forum, I usually end up feeling uneasy about my workplace when I was quite happy before and I sometimes wonder how these volunteers can represent pilots who quite often don't bother to obtain the available facts before opening up.
On more than one occaison, I have seen balpa sit on the fence when they should have been giving guidance to their members about an important issue and then they appear to have sided with management and stitched up their members.
It may be true that companes with a large membership ratio enjoy better conditions, in fact the market place dictates what we end up with and any significant improvement has only happened when airlines can't get pilots.
Historically when balpa representing the pilots in Big Airways thought they had the upper hand with their employers, they stitched them up to such an extent that balpa has been unable to halt the overall decline in real terms to pilots pay and conditions and everyone else has suffered ever since!
There are occaisonally some interesting articles in The Log but overall I can quite see why some would think of balpa as a little club for some running at the expense of all the majority.
On balance I will probably remain a member until I retire but I really dont think it is good value.