Are you happy for the rest of the membership who keep on stumping up every month to pay for those on your behalf?
This thread is not really about union membership, nor is it about BMI Baby pilots. However since you ask, I am really unhappy about the representation of one of my mates when he really needed the correct advice and representation from BALPA. It is the company who sacked him when he was innocent, but it was the union who gave him daft advice. Coupling this with a BALPA direction which I believe is actually ruining my terms and conditions, then no I am not happy for the rest of the membership to be paying on my behalf. The whole point is that I do not like the fundamental direction of the union, and overall, I do not want to be represented by it - paid for by myself or anybody else. I have remained in the union about 8 years longer than I should have done. I stayed because of the arguments that you are selfish to take what the union negotiate when others are paying for it. But enough is enough.
Since the Count brought this up, let's just pop in a word about the cabin crew dispute. I disagreed with a huge amount that the cabin crew were doing, but our union was wrong in the way it handled the matter of volunteer cabin crew. It should have explained that like me, it disagreed with what the cabin crew were doing, but that whilst it could not stop pilots from volunteering in the cabin, it did not think that we should be doing so. I came to my decision by asking myself whether I would be happy if someone came in and did my job for me whilst I was trying to send the company a message. As I say, I disagreed with the cabin crews' actions, but it was obvious the company was going to win - they didn't need our help. in the end, a minority of pilots volunteered, but pretty much all 'legacy' cabin crew assume that every pilot they meet was a volunteer. That in itself was one huge colossal mistake made by our union - again, bad advice! That one thing has done more to ruin my time at work, than pretty much everything the company have suggested doing over the last decade.