My suspicion is, that despite "toodle pip's" frequent imploring of all and sundry to attend the Thursday one-way talk fests so management could hear our concerns, attendance has been low enough to get the message across to management that, on the whole, the pilot group have done a Clark Gable on 'em. (Brett's message to Scarlett in that scene from "Gone With The Wind", for anyone for whom that was a bit cryptic.)
So, in that grand old tradition of "the whippings will continue until morale improves", they've decided to force pilots to attend what seems to be a carbon copy of the Thursday meetings. Why only captains? Could I be right in thinking that the vast majority of attendees at the Thursday meetings were FOs, keen not to ruffle any feathers that might need to remain smooth with selection for upgrade in mind?
If the message to be imparted is so important that the conference is to be made compulsory, two questions immediately come to mind:
(1) Are we to be told something the FOs should not be privy to? The implications, if that's even halfway true, are mind-boggling and more than a little worrying in this day of CRM and Transcockpit Authority Gradients, particularly if it's some instruction regarding watching the FOs more closely.
and
(2) What in the world were they thinking when they came out with the no transport idea? 30 pilots per meeting? Put on a single bus. The downside to that idea (from management's perspective, at least), might be that getting 30 (I can guarantee you) - disaffected captains together in a crowded bus before a compulsory duty they're quite obviously not going to be paid for might result in a little more "bonding" than management might prefer.
From the pilots' perspective, it would be a real novelty - actually seeing a few work colleagues, a near impossibility in the new "keep 'em separated at all costs" COC.