My longstanding (and perhaps overly simplistic) view has been that even a crappy union like the TWU can score some wins when negotiating across the table from a wildly profitable company (like WN), but even the best union can't stop concessions when the company is losing money. When there is no profit pie to split up, concessions are gonna happen. They happened at AA, UA, DL, NW, CO and US. And as long as the workers get a few percent in raises each year, nobody's gonna expend a single calorie in attempts to boot the union.
Many of the affected employees at those airlines were represented. And none of those workgroups were successful at derailing the concession train. CO flight attendants held them off for a while, but finally settled on some wage cuts.
In fact, there's some evidence that representation led to a worse outcome for the employees: In his attempts to organize the CO ramp, Little mentioned that their 10% wage cuts would have been less had they been represented by the TWU. I would hope that everyone here could agree that nothing could be further from the truth; 10% wage cuts are some of the lowest percentage cuts suffered by any legacy workgroup during the 2002-2006 timeframe. Union membership may be valuable overall for airline ramp employees - but when CO was seeking concessions, lack of union membership didn't seem to disadvantage those workers one bit. They fared OK.
My guess is that the WN FAs will continue on their merry way with the TWU (nondemocratic as it may be) until the day after WN demands wage cuts or offers a minimal wage increase (like 1% a year). Bob Owens has posted that there were times in history when the TWU didn't seem so bad - maybe when AA's AMTs and ramp were getting OK raises and work rule gains. But when AA demanded and got wage concessions - suddenly the TWU was worse than Satan himself. My prediction is that the same will happen at WN with the FAs unless WN is able to keep cranking out profits to be shared with the workers.
