This is not just an Envoy issue. Republic pilots (who now fly under the Eagle brand) recently rejected a contract that had pay *increases*. AA/US may say they want to put new planes at Piedmont, but Piedmont is currently a very small operation on the flight side and those pilots would undoubtedly demand a pay increase to fly the bigger planes.

There are government forces at work (higher flight time requirement) and there are also market forces at work (~4-5 years ago during the height of the recession a lot of young people consciously made the decision not to pursue a career as an airline pilot because the pay and working conditions were bad and they did not want to or could not take out loans to pay for their training). Interestingly, the government forces are magnifying the market forces, not the reverse. As a result, pilots at regional airlines are in a better position than they have been in a long time. It is not necessarily a union/non-union thing---if there is a glut of pilots even the best union is going to be pretty useless, and if there is a shortage, even the most incompetent union will be able to win a pay raise.

Moving the aircraft from one regional to another is just buying time on AA's part. I think over the next few years we will finally actually see a shift toward more mainline.