Nope, I'm afraid you are the one who is wrong. Your MEC told ours they would see us in arbitration. There was no where to negotiate and DOH was once again their holy grail. Fences? C&R's? Nope. Your negotiators were beside themselves when the subject was brought up. I was at the briefings. I attended all the ALPA meetings at the time. How many did you attend? I sat on many of your jumpseats commuting to NY, and enduring lectures from junior 737 captains about their DOH and west coast 767 dreams. Please don't try to tell me that NOBODY wanted anything besides job security. I can't say I know a majority of your pilots. I can say that 30 - 40% of the ones I did meet had the same old talking points. And they were quite arrogant about it.
As for long term job security, imagine if that abortion of a merger actually did happen in 2000. Your long term job security dreams would have come at the expense of thousands of UA pilots when the post 9/11 furloughs started. It would have been our guys on the street instead of your 17 year junior pilots, if your DOH aspirations actually succeeded. (Which btw, I told many of your counterparts would never happen, 10 years ago, and it still has not. DOH mergers have gone the way of a regulated airline industry.) But as you've proven with the West pilots, you would have been OK with that.
Ironically, your collective actions have poisoned your own well, making a merger with anyone else a pipe dream except under the most extreme circumstances like another bankruptcy. It killed the chance to participate in the current consolidation trend. It killed your chances of reaping any benefit from the broad industry recovery ongoing. It killed any long term job security you could have had from the multiple merger attempts with UA and DL. Once USAPA and the east foisted their plan upon the west pilots, there was no more speculation as to your intentions. It was in plain light for all to see, isolating you to an island of your very own that no one else would touch with a ten foot pole.
