BIGBAD:
I have no inclination to pay for their actions ref. against open skies which cost BALPA £2m !!!! WTF !!! And this is why BALPA is now financially f$¥#%#% !
Clearly didn't think that through very well did we?.
Let's see, 3500 x (£75 avg - some pay £40, many pay £60-80 and quite a few pay over £100) x 12 = £3,150,000 annually from the BA community (more or less). I think we earned the right to spend £2.1m in ONE year on a test case which, in the end, served as a finger burner. As the saying goes: bad things happen for a reason; had we not done this then the BMI thing might have gone another way. Also, BALPA (BACC) are human and expected to make mistakes occasionally.
I'm genuinely sorry that Virgin's CC are not up to scratch. The members voted them in, we didn't, Jim McAuslan didn't vote them in and neither did Mark Searle (an EJ pilot BTW). Every airline has a slightly different set of problems which is why you have the CC.
I hope that your new Union works for you, BIGBAD, I really do but you have to ask yourself what you hope to achieve and how you are going to achieve it. Cutting your noses off to spite your faces is only going to hurt yourselves. You are still going to have to vote in a CC but this time they will have even less tools at their disposal because the experience, the resources and the expertise (as well as the financial backing) are gone. Until you get up to the level of BALPA on all these things... Virgin's management must be salivating at the thought of moving in for the kill. As I say, I hope I'm wrong because I have a few mates at Virgin.
As for the rest of you unfortunates without jobs or prospects etc. I'm genuinely sorry that this thread seems to be about US getting a load of money when you are all still struggling but I think the original intention of the thread was simply to acknowledge some hard work and determination on (mainly) the part of our CC but also by BALPA who do get a lot of stick.
As has been said before, if other unions spent less time bleating about their misfortunes and gnashing their teeth from the corners, they might have employed their energies to get their membership the same.