The good old days might have begun to fade when the flight attendants here were no longer required to be young, good-looking, single females.
As for some of the large, impersonal corporations: some of the people who fly a desk at the airlines are probably jealous of the limited authority (and sometimes, the days off in a row) which many pilots still have, and by increasing the number of company policies, procedures and limitations along with an attempt to enforce more regimentation, they attempt to:
1) place more liability on the flightcrews.
2) try to fly our planes from their desks/cubicles.
And by very liberally using the phrase "force majeur" and "etc" as loopholes, they can now disregard almost anything in a labor contract-even when the latest pilot furlough notices here are to take place NEXT winter! There must be a good bit of shared legal "expertise" over here between the various airlines, in order to punch large holes in the "scope" agreements. The ATA is the powerful industry lobby group which would love to throw away the Railway Labor Act, which governs the US airline negotiation (+mediation and arbitration) procedures.
What is this process called in Britain and other places?
