BC Flyer: You say, "Senior guys benefit, junior guys get hung out to dry again..." and "This will do nothing but penalize the junior ranks..."
Have you given any thought at all to addressing the fundamental issue that I raised at the outset of this thread? Namely, the reality that this law cannot be overcome, and that it must be dealt with?
This entire fiasco could have been avoided had ACPA dealt with the facts and reality of the law when this issue first arose over four years ago. That was my advise then, and that has been my advice since. Ignored.
Nobody appears to want to discuss the fundamental facts that ACPA members will have to face. There are now almost 150 Complainants before the Commission and the Tribunal, all of whom will likely be given the same option as G.V. and N.K. to return to full employment. Most of us won't be restricted to flying as F/O's, as they were, by reason of their conceding the restrictions related to ICAO for pilots-in-command over age 65. And the cease order will make it a lot easier for many, many others now coming up to age 60 to opt to stay, without even being visible or litigious. The change is now upon us.
To my understanding there is a large segment of the ACPA membership, in addition to the approximately 25% that voted in favour of ending mandatory retirement, that was not even on the premises when the vote was taken in April, 2006. Many of those pilots (average age of hire, 34) may start to flex their voting muscles, once the legal pendulum starts to inevitably swing--they may very well demand that ACPA revisit its strategy of spending their union dues fighting an unwinnable cause that they were not even given the opportunity to exercise their democratic rights of participation in, regardless of whether they favour the change or not.
As I said earlier in the thread, "...despite the tendency to overlay the issues with all sorts of irrelevant emotional distractions, such as anyone's purported motivation, we need to address the one issue that is before us, namely integrating the necessary changes into our workplace."
The impact on the junior pilots is now almost a given. It need not have been that way. Don't blame me or us for the failure of your own Association to manage the inevitable impact of the law of the land on your working relationship. There were many manageable alternatives available, all of which were discounted and/or ignored by ACPA in favour of denying or delaying the day and cost of reckoning. Still your Association fights on, suggesting appeals as well as alternatives that propose to continue the age discrimination in one form or another, notwithstanding the Tribunal's finding that its actions were and are illegal. The work of the renowned historian Barbara Tuchman comes to mind..."The March of Folly...From Troy to Vietnam."
Finally, let's talk about your assertion, " Its all about GREED pure and simple..."
Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that that assertion is correct. That accusation has been levelled at me and at every one of my associates who realize that mandatory retirement is no longer legally supportable. I do not agree with the proposition (for a number of reasons than could be the subject of a separate thread), but nevertheless, does that change anything for you? Anything at all?
Not one iota. The decisions of the Tribunal and the Courts have no regard to the motivation of the litigants, and the Tribunal members and judges are loathe to contaminate their reviewable decisions by taking any such evidence into consideration, even if that evidence were before them, which it is not.
So the decisions are coming, regardless. The impact will be identical, regardless of who brought the case forward and regardless of what their motivations were. And your working relationship will be impacted.
What are you going to do about that? Manage it, or curse it? Are you planning to deal with it in a positive manner or in a negative manner? Are you planning to support creative incentives for pilots to leave at age 60 or earlier, or are you going to support negative incentives that purport to continue the discrimination based upon age and punish those who elect to stay even for one year beyond age 60?
In other words, is your motivation and action going to be based upon reason, or will it be based upon emotion and contempt arising from your assumptions about others' motivation, notwithstanding the inevitability of the law and notwithstanding how irrelevant their motivation is to the outcome?
How about answering that question?
Last edited by Raymond767; 15th May 2010 at 21:17.