With the merger announcement now looking imminent, I'm curious about thoughts on the usually contentious issue of merging seniority lists. Not on specific progress or proposals, just in general.

I have a relative who worked for Hughes which became Republic which merged into Northwest. As I heard it, his seniority list was basically stapled, which lead to howls of complaints of unfairness. But he was young enough that he sucked it up and eventually got to captain on 747s before recently retiring.

But no matter how it's done, it seems there is no way to "fairly" merge the list. Regardless, two lists of 1-500 becoming one list of 1-1000 involves the average of number of the list doubling. For the casual observer date of hire initially sounds fair, but upon further inspection you can get situations where fleet differences lead to crew being seriously below others for "lesser planes", significant captain/FO inversions, the "hiring bursts" of airline A happened out of sync from the "hiring bursts" of airline B making all/most of airline B feeling they were short shrifted, or any number of other things where when you look at the combined list you say "that's doesn't look right". Take into consideration the outcomes like expected pay or imminent retirements versus before also give you an additional bunch of "that doesn't look right". Weighted date or list combining on a strict ratio also usually give these same effects. I'd think United has many factors like these to make any simple process bad.

IMHO, coming down to a manual construction is the most fair taking into account all the factors, but ouch, that's a hard thing to do and certainly prone to a lot more criticism than simpler "fairer" methods. Do we just send all seniority merges straight to binding arbitration? Seems that's what happens with the ALPA merger policy after going through the steps of "settle between yourselves" and "try again with a mediator" first.

How should a good process work, or is the ALPA's as good as it gets?