Delta Pilots Upset That Primo Routes to Europe Are Going to Foreign Partners
Photo Credit: Three Delta Air Lines pilots walk through an airport. The carrier's pilot union is concerned about the airline's joint ventures. Skift / Delta Air Lines
Skift Take
At your typical U.S. airline, a minor dispute between a labor union and management is not unusual. But Delta has a lot fewer of these skirmishes than its competitors.
Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian likes to say his company's competitive advantage is its people, but at least one employee group at America's most profitable airline is unhappy.
It's the pilots, the only major workgroup represented by a labor union. Last week, Delta's Master Executive Council of the Air Line Pilots Association wrote to federal regulators to ask them to take a special look at Delta's joint venture agreements with Air France-KLM, Virgin Atlantic, and Alitalia to ensure they're fair to labor.
Delta has antitrust immunity with the three European airline companies, and Delta shares costs and revenue with them on transatlantic flights. While the union has supported this arrangement in the past, pilots used the new filing to ask whether Delta wants to leverage the joint ventures so it can fly fewer transatlantic flights and save on labor costs.
By turning over more flying to European airlines, Delta has been engaging in "labor arbitrage," the union claims. The union sa
