Sadly, this is the reality of your situation. Think about the statements above.
Take it from a longtime veteran, it's not about "emotion" and feel good moral victories. It's just business, folks... nothing personal. Wearing cool t-shirts and yelling and waving posters is quite amusing to your corporate masters who chuckle at the easily manipulated masses who think they are actually accomplishing something with their outbursts and feel good rallies. Your union corporate bosses know these performances accomplish nothing towards achieving just contracts and improvements, yet it is a convenient and easy way to con their membership into believing they have a voice and any degree of power in today's corporate life. If you think your union gives a damn about you, I must say you are very naive. You are simply a unit of dues production, unions are as capitalistic, exploitive, and heartless as corporate America and are complicit with the globalist agenda and destruction of the American middle class.
These displays mean zero, zilch, nada, nothing to your corporate bosses, and less than that to your customers. (And please keep in mind, I'm on your side... I'm a member of a "union", a rather impotent and ineffective one, as most are these days. We face a very difficult future, this is an extremely vulnerable industry and you will NEVER have job security nor a promising financial future "working for the man" at this company.) If you are under 30, by all means get out as quick as you can find a decent job in a less volatile industry. If you are over 40, better hang on at all costs because no one wants to hire you at all, so ride this pig into the sunset. (Talk about some mixed metaphors...) 😀
Airline management sees you as a cost unit they would love to be rid of if possible, and if they could do so, they would outsource every job they could to the lowest bidder. That not being possible in all cases (yet), they will keep your pay and benefits as low as they possibly can, you need to rid yourselves of any notion of fairness, justice, being made whole after givebacks, etc.
I know it sucks, but it is what it is. The Railway Labor Act, which governs your CBA's, limits the union options and I get the impression from reading some of the comments on here that not a lot of younger folks have any idea of what must take place, what "power" they might be able to wield, etc. Please don't waste another hour of your life trying to win the "public" to your cause. In case you haven't noticed, this entire country is teetering at the very brink of insolvency, the foreclosure train is still rolling strong, there are no new jobs of any significance on the horizon coming to this nation, and times are grim. No one gives a rat's butt about our employment issues.
It's a battle simply to survive these days, and I anticipate we haven't seen the WORST of it yet.
Plan for the worst, and hope for the best.