Southwest Airlines’ and Airtran Airlines’ pilots unions have agreed to agree on the process for integrating their seniority lists. This isn’t an agreement on merging the lists but simply an agreement on how they’ll go about doing so.

They’ll first negotiate and then if they don’t get an agreement, they’ll have mediated talks and if those don’t work, they’ll have arbitration with a binding agreement. Standard stuff between unions but what I like is the fact that they’ve set deadlines for all these processes and those deadlines all fall within 2011. Good on both of them.

This process is governed by the McCaskill-Bond Act which was passed by Congress after the AA-TWA merger and the flight attendants union simply stapling on employees to the bottom of their list.

A curious question comes to my mind on US Airways as a result of this. I believe such a process was followed by US Airways and America West pilots unions. The result was an arbitrated result that the US Airways pilots didn’t like. The process was hijacked by US Airways pilots who initiated a vote amongst *all* pilots for new union representation. Since US Airways pilots outnumbered America West pilots, they got their way at the end of the day. At least until America West pilots sued. It would seem to me that federal law may well have been violated in this. If any readers here know the status of this, please comment.

Filed under: Airline News by ajax