Airline Pilots: Is Anybody Interested in Being One?

[HiPointDem]

44. well, then:

http://www.angelfire.com/al/silverball/strikes.html

Before 1982, Greyhound was a prosperous company that prided itself on paying the highest wages in the industry.

Deregulation of the transportation industry made the competition for passengers even stiffer. New entrepreneurs who paid low wages entered the business and offered fare prices much lower than the more established inter-city lines.

The newly deregulated airline industry made things even worse for Greyhound.

Low-cost passenger airline carriers sprang up after deregulation of the industry and gave intercity bus lines a run for their money. People Express, for example, charged only $23 for a flight between New York City and Buffalo. Greyhound charged $41 for the trip. A flight by Southwest Airlines from San Francisco to Phoenix was only $60, compared to a Greyhound's bus ticket to the same location costing $79. By the middle of 1983, Greyhound showed an operating loss of $18 million. Greyhound's operating costs were 30 to 50 percent higher than that of other major bus lines.

A painful seven-week strike had come to an end just a few days before Christmas. But the ATU had suffered a major defeat that would haunt it for years to come. It had to settle for the same 7.8 percent wage cut the company had insisted on way back in November. In addition, the union had to swallow a cut in pay from ten to eight percent per year; a four percent cut in pension benefits, and a two-tier pay schedule that paid new hires 20-25 percent less than employees under the old contract.

Greyhound, on the other hand, boasted that it had gained the wage parity it had been seeking, yet at the same time paid the highest wages in the industry. At that time, labor costs amounted to about 62 percent of total operating costs. The union's concessions had brought the company about an eight- percent reduction in bus line operating expenses over the life of the new three-year contract.