When I was hired at Eastern in '84, the contract and ALPA merger policy had no mention of "fairness". Fairness is NOT an objective standard, period. What one man calls fair, another screams "outrage" with his dying breath. Don't believe me, ask the Capitol guys at United, the Chicago & Southern and Northeast guys at Delta, the Air Cal and Trans Carib guys at American-every group screams unfairness at their merger lists. And then, there is the other blatant nonsense of asset transfers. When I was hired, we had just taken over the BN South America routes, BN pilots were figuring out where they would fit into our list. Management and the MEC, looked and said, "who are you?" Should have been merged into us, much to their long-term detriment.
Seniority is the one Objective standard. If they entered the industry ten years before you, you wait. Saying they had no futures and should be glad to have jobs, is just whistling before the graveyard and using hindsight to justify a good luck. AW, at its inception was not given much of a chance and USAir was coming off a decade of profits and was the darling of deregulation, then the mergers of Piedmont and PSA and Steve Wolf management came. DL was THE airline to get hired with, but no more.
The point of seniority is to eliminate these arguments, but it just fuels them. Glad my life isn't subject to this insanity anymore.
Just bomb-throwing: Why isn't America West, instead of US Airways??