CaptKremin,
Nothing whatsoever to do with backbone. As rubik101 & I have suggested open your eyes.
Look around you at what you have at your disposal for ( as a colleague put to me ) an "army". You, my friend, are an army of 1, along with anyone else who is still harbouring this idea of finding " unity" amongst our colleagues.
It isn't defeatism, it is accepting reality.
Look , at the different factions you have at your disposal.
1 - Brand new cadets, deeply in debt, very very grateful that their first job is on a shiny Boeing totally unable to participate in any industrial action, and ,until they are screwed over, many blissfully unaware of why anyone would even want to.
2 - the same guy a couple of years later. A marketable commodity, he is either in a base he likes, applying to Emirates, or looking at taking a Sim job at EMA to further his career.
3 -two years later he has either gone, or is looking at a command upgrade soon. He won't rock the boat.
4 - another year or two, he has accepted to be LTC followed by IRE/TRE ( all available rather too fast in reality, but great for him whether he stays or moves) or, yet again he has gone to pastures new
5 - if he is still around after all this he either thinks it's OK, realises that the grass elsewhere is in many cases just a different shade of brown,or he becomes bitter & twisted and wastes half his spare time frequenting PPRuNe & REPAweb. He also realises by speaking to his colleagues, that, whilst they are more than willing to have a good old winge in the cruise, when you actually ask them to do anything ( even join a union) they fade away.
This company is populated with bods who have either always from Day1 cared only about self interest, and see a very ripe environment for self promotion around them as long as they just forget the big picture, and others, who used to feel like you, but have just become dissillusioned by the lack of any progress by BALPA/IALPA culminating last year in the failure of BALPA to press for recognition at a time when the numbers were ( for once and probably only just this once ) enough for it to work, and the failure of the Irish courts to make a logical judgement on the labour court case. To this we can add cultural and geographical disparity, which makes even harder the task of any coordinated response, and even easier the task of those who would wish to quell it.
The army is decimated,not entirely due to lack ( as you would have it ) of backbone. It is fed up of promises unfulfilled, of seeing people turning coat either because a carrot was dangled or they simply got fed up of waiting for the promised land which never came.
In the current job situation very few people will even contemplate rocking the boat, particularly a new guy with big debts and few hours, and all the time the company experience levels go down, and the proportion of newbees goes up.
Is this really the scenario to take a fight to Ryanair ?
Do you really think the Irish government are really gonna stick it up Micky who brings so much income into Ireland and is employing so many people in a defunct industry at a difficult time.
For chrissakes man, GET REAL.