Amid Acrimonious Contract Negotiations, NetJets Says Ads hit Too Hard

NetJets Aviation sprung a surprise lawsuit on their pilot union, the JetJets Association of Shared Aircraft Pilots, alleging that the group's fairly public statements over the last year defamed the company.

The union represents 3,400 aviators in all, and has been in the middle of a pretty acrimonious back and forth with their employer throughout the last year of their new contract negotiations. Now, the contracts have been settled, leading outsiders to expect a return to relative peace between the two. Instead, things have been just as cantankerous from the outside looking in, with the NJASAP suggesting retaliation towards employee leadership for their union activities, and the company describing their actions as damaging to the company as a whole. Specifically, the lawsuit alleges that the Union has defamed the company in its statements regarding safety, maintenance, and pilot training concerts stretching back nearly a year in total.

Throughout their public awareness campaign, NJASAP often cited Berkshire Hathaway's own words as proof against the firm's negotiations, bludgeoning them with the idea that high quality of piloting, maintenance, and operations- ergo safety in all the above - is always worth the added cost no matter how great. The new lawsuit puts to rest some of the mutterings throughout the whole process, as some had worried that the union was playing it a little too fast and loose with their public-facing advertisements. At a certain point, management may have felt that the finer points of the ads were lost on the unsophisticated consumer, who forgets the specifics of what's going on at NetJets, but remembers that "safety" was in question somehow. 

"NJASAP stands by the concerns we have raised about pilot training and the safety and maintenance cultures – concerns that have only increased in intensity in recent months," NJASAP President Captain Pedro Leroux said. "We view the lawsuit as an attempt to silence us, however, NJASAP has a federally protected right and an organizational and moral responsibility to our members – the NetJets pilots – and to our customers to raise safety issues, and we will continue to do just that."

"Despite our outreach, management has chosen not to engage us in this manner, opting instead to expend its time and energy pursuing legal action against its front-line employees rather than addressing our legitimate concerns," Leroux added. "Management's retaliatory course of action will not compel us to abandon our mission: NJASAP will not be intimidated into silence by anyone or anything, including a lawsuit."

FMI: www.njasap.com