Outsourcing is a factor that no doubts presents a challenge, but the bigger factor is Unions have failed their memberships.
Around 80% of the airline industry is still Unionized and with that power they could pressure for favorable regulation and have adequate leverage to bring back compensation to fair levels but the problem is many Union leaders treat their memberships as commodities and design their strategies on maintaining their dues flow instead of maintaining the level of compensation that one expects as a Union member. While many carriers have disappeared and the industry has consolidated the number of Unions, remains the same, or has increased as disillusioned memberships unable to reform the unions they have form new ones. The trend towards consolidation was inevitable once the industry was deregulated and the Unions adopted the strategy that they wanted to be the bargaining representative of the carrier that survived which put their members in a race to the bottom. Its not just coincidence that those workers, such as pilots and flight attendants, who had fewer dominant Unions competing for members, fared better than the others.
Look at the debacle planned for ground workers at AA, while USAIR and AA have become one airline, the leaders of the TWU and IAM decided to split the membership between two unions based solely on making sure that each union keeps the same number of members that they had prior to the merger. In the case of the mechanics they both produced agreements where compensation is lower than non-union. They have designed a structure based solely on the cash flow to the parent unions and does nothing to create a common culture between the two groups of workers. Its so blatant that this design is about retaining dues that members at different locations get horse traded between Unions based on Location, move from NY to BOS and you move into a different Union. They even agreed to reshuffle the deck is stations close. So lets say Pittsburg shuts down, members in Denver who were never IAM members could see themselves forced into the IAM and have to pay more dues for the same exact work rules and pay. The focus of this structure clearly isn't to correct the fact that both came together with their dues paying members at the very bottom of the industry but rather to insure that both organizations continue to collect the same amount of dues from those poorly represented members.
Blaming it on outsourcing provides the Unions with an excuse for poor performance, yes those two factors present challenges, always have and always will, but thats not an excuse for the failure of Unions to face up to those challenges, if the Unions were doing a good job they would be able to quickly organize those vendors who do the outsourcing and wages would be maintained.
