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This has become quite the active topic both here and on the floor. But there has been many events to suggest the uptick to the current market value. In review of the past few months there have been some significant signals to Wall Street to the solvency of this company. One is the opening of terminal "D" at DFW, and the other is the 20yr. pension relief to be afforded the airlines. To the best of my memory I believe AA ranked the highest for the most funded DB plans of the legacy carriers. If I can recall The TWU pension plan at years end was funded in excess of 75% and AA had continued to make good on their pension obligations with a contribution to the plan before the 20 yr. deal was made. This signals to investors a company determined to survive. Before you start farting in the bathtub, and biting at the bubbles, "I'm not happy about the topic of this thread either!" Welcome to corporate AMERICA........ <_<
Here we go again, twu/aa suckups bragging that the plan is "only" 25% UNDERFUNDED.
The fact is that they still have not contributed enough to cover the obligations they have made, sure its "legal" for them to underfund the plan but its certainly not something a "union" should cheer about.
How many of you out there remember how in the 90s when the company was posting record profits and we started balking about our TWU negotiated concessions that one of the companys responses was that we should not be fooled by the profits because much of those profits were not from operations, but rather from excess earnings from the pension plan?
Thats right the company withdrew hundreds of millions of dollars out of the pension plan and used it to buy back stock, expand the fleet, build new terminals etc. The buy back of $2 billion worth of stock sent the stock price up, so pension money was effectively distributed to the stockholders. If those monies had been left in the plan there would be no shortage today.
Saving the pension was supposedly the reason why we lost 25% of our pay. Was it worth it for the majority of workers? Lets not forget that by lowering our pay we are also lowering our pension. But if we break it down into numbers we have to compare what we lost in order to save what we might not have really saved.
By the companys own calculations they claim that their contribution to pension comes out to $3000 a year for a mechanic, however the mechanic gave up around $20,000 a year to save that.
So $20000 a year was given up for something worth only $3000 a year, with no guarantee that the pension will survive.
Another thing we see the company/twu doing is throwing out the figures for how much the company has contributed to the pension, however they do not breakdown how these figures correspond to each workgroup. These contribution cover ALL employees, even the executives. My guess is that the overwhelming balance of the payment is going to cover the executives and pilots pensions.
So when the company claims that they contributed $600 million to the pension which makes the fund 75% funded mechanics can figure out how much was put in for them. Basically ignore the $600million, it means nothing. Instead go to jetnet and look it up in your pension. 75% of $3000 was put in, or $2250, they shorted you $750, and you gave up $20,000 in order for them to put in the $2250, which still leaves your reduced pension, reduced because your pension is based upon your reduced wage, underfunded.
Another way is to calculate it as a group is to multiply $3000 times 12000 Title I, which comes out to $36 million X .75 which Equals $27 million. So as a group Title I gave $240 million in concessions to preserve a $27 million pension contribution.
So they put in $600 million and only $27million was to cover Title I. Title I makes up what, around 10% of the workforce if not more? But only around 4% of $600 million was to cover 75% of the Title I pension. Most of the other workers are paid less than titleI. I guess that when you figure all the other TWU which make up at least 1/3rd of the company you will only cover around 15% of the contribution. Throw in the ticket agents, other non union workers and the Flight Attendants and you might be up to 30% of the money with well over 80% of the workforce, so the other 70% of the contribution is to cover the executives and the pilots pensions, and these people make up less than 20% of the workforce.
So once again we have to ask why would the Intnl have us give up $20,000 a year to save something worth only $3000, give up $240 million for just $27 million?
In part, the answer lies with the $3.1 million that the company gives to TWU officials.
You see to the Intnl the $240 million is "other peoples money" -YOURS- but the $3.1 million is "THEIR MONEY".
You see they gave up 17% of their AA paycheck in order to keep 83% of it plus they get to continue to double-dip on the pension-earning both TWU and AA pensions at the same time. If the TWU INtnl had refused to grant AA the most sweeping concessions ever they stood to lose their AA paycheck and would no longer be able to double-dip. They really dont care if we find out about this because we cant remove them anyhow, however Gary Yingst was VERY VERY concerned during his deposition that we would release his home address,which is understandable given that there are a lot of people carrying guns in Oklahoma, in fact the lawyers for the TWU asked the court for an injunction barring me from disclosing anything from the depositions.
