Frankly, I think rolling UA executive salaries back to about _1980_ levels would be a fantastic first step. Although I'm fairly disgusted by the mechanics voting to strike now, the other side has virtually no credibility to tell them they shouldn't. Executive salaries in the U.S. now are ridiculously disproportionate (watch any Disney movie in the last five years and tell me Mike Eisner is worth it), especially at a company as poorly managed as United has been. (Even worse is, of course, US Airways, where the problems are worse and the pay higher; I'd like to see Big Steve cross the Mason-Dixon and face the music.) Certainly, United management needs to ask themselves why they didn't settle a contract with their mechanics say two or three years ago? Good lesson to management everywhere: better to settle when times are good than to wait for a rainy day. Having said that, now is clearly a terrible time to carry out a strike, and will have the prime result of endangering a lot of other unionized staff's jobs as well. I wonder how the flight attendants, res agents, or even the pilots feel about this? But as Dennis says, I don't think now is the time to play the blame game. It won't solve anything and is a waste of energy. Labour and management need to sit down and get creative to save the company from a serious disaster for everyone. What about, just hypothetically speaking, management conceding to the union's terms, but writing in a clause postponing their introduction until, say, two quarters pass with a profit above $5 million posted, after which it will be retroactive until 1996? Unconventional, but so far convention is leading down the road to tragedy. Evan McElravy emcelr@po-box.mcgill.ca http://users.penn.com/~cpa1/ > From: Dennis W Zeuch <DZTOPS@aol.com> > Reply-To: The Airline List <AIRLINE@LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU>, DZTOPS@aol.com > Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 22:03:40 -0500 (EST) > To: AIRLINE@LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU > Subject: Re: UA mechs vote to strike > > Before you jump on this critically, think are all the UAL corporate execs > willing to roll back their pay to 1996 levels? etc etc > We dont have all the details of the proposal so lets not start blaming the > mechanics for destroying the airline--the managers can do that with out any > help > Dennis >