Checking it Out said:
Just a reminder, Amfa has claimed in the past they have certain amount of cards when they do not. This is a typical amfa ploy and they intend to deceive the members into believing they have more cards than they have.
Amfa intends on inflating the numbers like they did at United and than attempt to blame the TWU. Look here to see this in work at USAIR;
Lies about card count 54%
Latter in the month;
47% card count
Meeting in September;
Kevin Wildermouth claims 33% valid cards
Who is lieing or telling the truth you be the Judge!
In September 2001 amfa delle claimed to have over 50% valid cards and failed to call for an election at AA, another lie?
If you go by the card counts and numbers here at AA I suspect the valid card count is closer to 40% and the numbers have been inflated. This is easy to believe and I believe it is the truth. If amfa actually had over 50% than amfa national would be paying for the advertising and Brady theater instead of local 12 begging for money.
Amfa is inflating the numbers to keep the organizers motivated, anyone with common sense understands that a good portion of the cards are expiring sooner than you are led to believe. Many comments have been made in the last 30 days by key organizers at several stations.
Or it could be that the guys at USAIR who were collecting cards only counted the guys who were still working? You have to remember that AMFA does not pay an organizing staff like the TWU. Members come to AMFA, AMFA does not pay people to go around soliciting and promising things to get members. So they may have sent in the cards thinking they had 50% when in fact they only had 50% of those still working. Thats an error not a lie.
I did not see any evidence supporting your claim that Wildermuth said they only had 33% but if he did so what? The letter in July stated that many cards were due to expire.
A lie is something like Jim Little saying "Not on my watch" would we agree to long term concessions. A lie is telling the members back in 95 that they dont have to worry about only 6% over 6 years because the "me too" clause will tie us to whatever raises the pilots got when they knew that our early out nulified the "ME too" clause.
The TWU has gotten so good at lieing that they dont know the difference between a lie and an error.
Its time for the TWU to go! AMFA and the AGW NOW!
We know our past, present and future with the TWU. Its called a nosedive. It was on the graph that Local 562 put in the ad in the Tulsa World last April. With the brief exception of the AMFA spike in 2001 it has been a consistant decline that will leave us roughly $14/ below the CPI adjusted rate in order to maintain our buying power at what mechanics lived on in the early 80s.
$14/hr! Thats nearly $30,000 less per year !!
Prior to AMFA at NWA we were around $7/hr under the CPI. AMFA restored the rate for all mechanics. The TWU is now sending out literature blasting AMFA. Most of the lies are virtual carbon copies of union busting campain literature. You could replace the word TWU and plug in Walmart and plug in Unions where it says AMFA and see that what the TWU is selling is that high wages will result in job losses. They are selling low wages and less benifits as being what is good for you. The same arguements that the enemies of labor have always used. "A low wage is better than no wage. " "Save yourselves, save the company." "The company loves you but they have to compete." "Its a tough world out there, you dont know how good you got it here." These are all company lines used to bust unions, and they are what is coming out of the TWU. Whereas the Union arguement-TWU as the exception because its not really a union- has always been that they will fight for the work and higher wages- not trade one off for the other, certainly never trade off wages. There is no way that any real union would give into pay cuts and concessions AND LAYOFFS in order to increase the production of a company. Layoffs always resulted from decreased production.
I went into this profession for two reasons. I like airplanes and I wanted to make good money. If I just wanted to work on airplanes and was happy with peanuts for wages I would have went into General Aviation, and worked days with weekends and Holidays off. I like working on airplanes but I want a high wage.
For the TWU high wages is not the goal. Their goal is not High paying jobs but dues paying jobs. They have no connection to what we do as aircraft mechanics. We are simply one of the many different types of workers that provide the International money for perks like Posh offices on Broadway($900,000 rent), Cars ($345,000), Exhorbitant Salaries ($200,000) and other perks that they use our dues money for that they want us to help them conceal from everyone, including us.
In the TWUs latest "Reason # 2", which I noticed is physically much smaller ( although they still overpaid on postage- what the hell its our money anyway right? This is how our dues are used))than the "Reason #1" the TWU blasted AMFA for contracting out work. But they fail to mention that AMFA has a grievance in on that. If AA were to do the same what could the TWU do about it? Nothing, we have no limit.
Whatever happened to our "Force Majeure" grievance? The fact is that AA keeps the work in house for only one reason, they cant get it done cheaper anywhere else.We dont need to pay a union two hours pay per month to get us lower wages. We need a union to fight for the work and higher wages.
When AMFA fought for and got the huge increase that we all benifitted from they did so under a PEB. When is the last time the TWU negotiated under a PEB? Under those conditions choices have to be made. At the time what was the most pressing demand by aircraft mechanics who were in short supply? Wages. And thats what they got, and still have, unlike us.
How likely would it have been to get both the wages and a complete prohibition on outsourcing out of a PEB? Not likely. The wage arguement was sellable, to couple that with a demand to be able to tell the company how to run its business would not have flown. The fact is that we have no such protections either, instead we had "p"s and "S"s. And we saw how firm they stood. NOT!
The TWU does not fight for us. Instead of uniting us and using our strength they sell fear. "You will all lose your jobs". They do what the company usually does. They are a company union. In good times they tell us that "You have to give a little to get a little, thats negotiations". So they negotiate increases in pay, that will be eroded by inflation in exchange for decreases in benifits that are not eroded by inflation. So years later the pay increase has lost its value and the benifits are gone. Another Win Win for the company, thanks to the TWU! In the bad times they tell us about "sacrifices" and that "we cant ask for anything and must give concessions or we will not have a job". So in good times and bad with the TWU we will give concessions. Sooner or later there will be nothing left. After 20 years of concessions do we really need to give them yet another chance? Can we afford to?
The TWU "negotiates" the lowest wages in the industry. They use confusing and elaborate pay structures to hide this. While some did get the top wage the overall wage is the lowest. At the 2001 contract they did match and slightly surpass the NWA/AMFA top rate, but those not at top yet recieved smaller increases than those at the top. Besides the TWU only kept that rate in place for slightly over a year.Before the Concessions we had OSMS, and their wages were still lower than post bankruptcy UAL and USAIR.
The Union completely failed to explain or even attempt to exploit the dynamics of a large company like AA. Despite the victory at UPS which made this clear- for which President Carey was subsequently railroaded out by the sellouts in the labor movement and industry. The fact is that even in hard economic times like this, with high unemployment the company still could not withstand a strike. We saw that back in 93 when the flight attendants struck. The company has grown even bigger since then. Between security clearences, background checks and skills the pool of qualified people who are unemployed is still not big enough to make it where the company can withstand a strike. Thats why they continue to swell the ranks of management while laying off workers, and the TWU is doing nothing about it.
The TWU keeps using the "fear" tactic. That the sky would fall if we did not give the company everything it asked for. What is ironic is that the TWU was born out of a similar situation. The Transit companies cut wages by 10%. This was during the Great Depression. A time of great economic dificulty that pales what is going on now. The unions in place sided with the company and agreed that the cuts were neccesary. Mike Quill and others dissagreed and set out to form the TWU, a union that would unite all the industry under one umbrella. The structure of unionism in the NYC TRansit industry was similar to what we have in this industry, only what we have is worse. Workers that did similar work were spread out between many different unions, the few that specialized in the Transit industry were company unions. Each union encouraged their members to take cuts because if they didn't then the company and the union that did agree to cuts could undercut them and their membership would decrease while the union that took cuts would increase.
Under the TWU and Mike Quill wages were no longer the means to gain a competative edge between companies. However, in our industry things have come full circle. Now the TWU is one of many different unions. They are the ones telling their members that they are powerless to fight against lower living standards and must agree to massive concessions. The TWU is doing this for the same reason that the pre-TWU transit unions did-because protecting and expanding the dues base became more important than the members quality of life. The TWU has been using short term crisis' to slip in permanent concessions and long term contracts that allow the company to expand. When it becomes clear that the concessions were excessive and the contract too long they simply blame the members for voting it in.
The airlines is a cyclical industry. Always has been. With those cycles comes layoffs. In the past short progressions to top pay and excellent wages and benifits under regulation made it so that the layoffs were an accepted fact of working in this industry, so if you were Junior, and you had some sense, you banked as much as you could in anticpation of the layoff. You could because you made a good wage.
Over the last twenty years, some things have changed while others have not. The cycles are still there. So are the layoiffs. But the high wages and short progressions are not. Infact not only are the progressions longer but they are steeper and end loaded. This means that our most junior brothers and sisters are in a particularly vulnerable position. They make peanuts and they cant put anything away to weather out a layoff. This makes them particularly vulnerable to the "fear" factor. The TWU was completely disengenous to our most Junior employees. They told them to vote for concessions to save their jobs with full knowledge that in fact they were voting to remove system protection from themselves.
Because of the vulnerability of our most junior employees I made a recommendation to Little that we work out a system of rolling layoffs. Every worker, at his choosing by seniority would take off a couple of weeks as an unpaid layoff. This would have benifited both the company and the members, assuming that the company's sole objective was survival and not to exploit the situation to screw the workforce. By having the rolling layoff the savings by having top paid workers take a few weeks off would offset the benifit costs of keeping the lowest paid on payroll while at the same time lowering overall payroll expense. As the demand for air travel picked up all the workers would be in place, morale would be good because even though annual income would be lowered-although some would undoubtably use the time to make money on the outside, the employees hourly wage would not have been cut. It would have fostered a team effort approach where all made a sacrifice but none were put in extreme hardship. AA would have been in the best position to scoop up the added demand while at the same time having a happy motivated workforce. While they may still be in such a position, thanks to the TWU provided cost advantage, their ability to deliver the product that AA customers expect with a demoralized workforce is another matter.
Instead of moderate hardship for everyone, a shared sacrifice, Jim Little opted for imposing a permanent hardship on the entire workforce along with an extreme hardship on our least senior workforce. He opted for a package that completely destroyed morale systemwide which may put AA into more jeapordy than the financial crisis of 2003. Coincidentally this package was desiged to maximize our losses while minimizing the loss of dues revenue. This was done by eliminating virtually everything that does not get calculated into the mothly dues pament.
All one needs to do is look at how long it takes to load a plane at JFK, how the company eliminated a lot of the maintenance on aircraft and how that is causing delays, how people, despite the tight labor market are quitting AA and going elswhere to see the devastating effect this has had on the morale. Not only have they destroyed morale within the company but many of those they laid off have become assetts to AAs competitors and are not going to return.
Unfortunately the TWU cares nothing about all of this. They have preserved the dues base and may be likely to expand it even more if they are recognized by AMR (with a 35% showing of interest) to represent more of their non union employees as has happened in the past. Its formula is to "work with" the company, even if the company seeks lower wages and less benifits for the workers. Its a formula that has been successful at sweeling the ranks of dues payers for the TWU for twenty years. Its been a disaster for airline workers across the entire industry. THe TWU is a malignant force in the airline labor movement, it needs to be cut out.
Its time for AMFA and the AGW.
8500 cards and climbing for AMFA!
Over 100 cards and climbing for the AGW!
Maybe there is a future for workers in this industry after all!
