contracts at airlines. They game the system and even when/if the company wants to increase compensation in some ways it is prohibited and restricted by current contract. That’s just for the pilots. They want to work as little as they can for the maximum compensation and that drives ticket prices up. Also saw many that were bad or below average pilots and horrible people get there jobs with back, after being fired, with back pay. The union typically found a clerical error in the paperwork the company filed regarding the termination.

Add to it just ONE aspect of the maintenance. Over 20 years ago navigation databases took 45-90 minutes to upload from multiple 3.5 inch floppy disks. The technology improved and the databases were able to be contained on a single storage device and the time to upload took under 10 minutes. I learned from a person that worked for one of these nav database companies that the union asked them to write in a minimum of 45 minutes of code that delayed the upload, presumably so that union avionics techs could continue having a built in break while doing their “job”.

There was a time and place for union protection, I believe that time has passed.