Derek Boreman

I hired on at Republic Airways as a First Officer in January 2008 and flew the line until late 2009, when I left. The pay at that time didn’t cover the cost of living, and I couldn’t afford to stay in the seat. I know what it costs a pilot when a contract doesn’t keep up. I lived it.

I spent the years that followed at Westinghouse Electric Company in Pittsburgh. I worked in nuclear field services as a tooling engineer, designing and implementing equipment used inside reactor containment during outages. I also worked on the international response to Fukushima Daiichi, designing remote handling equipment for spent fuel pool debris removal at Unit 3. I later moved into manufacturing, working in fuel tube and control rod tube production.

Every one of those jobs ran on the same thing this office runs on: accurate records, written procedures, and a paper trail that holds up when somebody asks a hard question a year later. In an industry where being wrong is expensive, documentation isn’t clerical work — it’s the safeguard.

I returned to Republic in September 2017 and currently fly as a Captain out of Pittsburgh. I have also worked as a line pilot instructor in the simulator, training alongside the pilots I’d be representing.

Recording Secretary is the record — what was said, what was decided, and what was promised. Done properly, it’s the thing that lets any member hold this Local, including the rest of this slate, to what it said it would do.

That means minutes that go out while people still remember the meeting. Records a member can actually get a copy of without a fight. And no gap between what happened in a room and what the membership is told happened.