Laughable that people think that way. ALPA and Teamsters are different animals. And the mechanics don't realize that great contract leads to furloughed pilots too. They only see the senior flight hours contract, not the middle and junior guy screw overs.
It's not really all about what you might think it is.
Fedex has made some drastic changes the past couples of years. Most notably to their pension plan. The old format was standard stuff. You get a % of x dollars per year for x years.
Fedex scrapped that in 03. What it is now, is you get one significantly smaller lump sum. If your pension was $500,000 for example, instead of getting x % a year for 20 years or whatever, now you get one lump sum check for like $100,000. Number's might not be accurate, but it's just to describe how the format works.
At first they gave existing employees the option of staying in the old format. A couple of years ago Fedex said screw it, every employee new and current goes to the new pension plan. This pissed off a lot of people, not just aircraft mechanics.
The pilots weren't affected because they had a contract. One of the big points of the pro-union guys is that Fedex can do whatever they want to maintenance because there is no contract. Like the pension thing.
But that's just one example. Insurance differences and some other stuff as well. And it doesn't help that Fedex is hiring a bunch of former Delta/Northwest mechanics off the street who came from a union environment.
