Protecting You
Grievances
Disputes over contract interpretation or discipline are filed with the assistance of Delta’s Grievance Committee. An ALPA attorney represents pilots throughout the arbitration process if discipline is involved and handles Delta MEC disputes regarding contract interpretation.
Whether your dispute is with your company's management regarding your job performance, the governing agencies on licensing or aeromedical matters, or a litigator in the wake of an accident or incident, ALPA Representation will become involved on your behalf.
Contract Enforcement
The legal representation of pilots in contract and discipline cases is serious business and requires union lawyers who devote their full time and attention to your issues—ALPA has the expertise and experience to support you.
The attorneys in ALPA's Representation and Legal departments, along with attorneys from ALPA's general counsel's office, routinely work on cases and advise pilots, and pilot group leadership, on discipline and contract enforcement issues. Depending on the nature of the cases, they're backed by experts in ALPA's Economic and Financial Analysis, Engineering and Air Safety, and Retirement and Insurance departments.
DPA’s lawyers, Seham Seham Meltz & Petersen (or Seham, for short), specialize in raiding unions when the membership is emotional over a contract, an arbitration award, a merger, or a bankruptcy. They are a group of advisors who are skilled at attacking unions but have established a miserable record when it comes to representing them.
Seham claims to have professional negotiators, but not a single member of the firm has ever negotiated a pilot agreement. They claim to be union lawyers, but, under their counsel, various airline managements have hired scabs, threatened union workers, and sought to deprive them of hard-earned wages and benefits in bankruptcy.
While it’s not illegal to represent both management and labor, it is extremely rare, and it raises a number of serious questions. First, unions typically refuse to finance the operations of a firm that spends part of its resources taking action against other unions and creating anti-union precedents that lower labor standards. Do you want to finance this work?