j7915 said:
Buck I am glad that you finally admit that you don't have a clue what AMFA has done at NWA. So we are all supposed to be voting for a blackhorse candidate.
I am not saying that mechanics should work for less. Our customers are voting with their dollars and the winners are the low cost, outsource everything carriers. Or are you so blind that you have not noticed that?
You call call yourself a highly skilled technician, then why are you fighting to keep people who are not as skilled from getting jobs they can handle? Will the person in the seat or wheel shop dilute your skills?
You only have three choices: the back shops with OSMs either employ OSMs or they contract out, third choice is a slow financial ruin.
There is a thing called "economies of scale" that dictates why smaller airlines outsourse while the larger airlines do more in house.
SWA, despite the fact that it pays its mechanics $6/more than us plus holiday pay, doubletime etc, has announced plans to bring more overhaul in house. Its growth makes this a good move for the company.
The fact is that work was brought in house at AA and will be at SWA because it is more efficient and less costly once the company has enough work- providing they are well managed. While todays aircraft require less maintenance than they did years ago for an airline the size of AA it should enjoy a cost advantage over carriers that outsource their work to a company that makes a profit doing that work. The profit that the outsouce company makes comes out of the company that sends the work there. In addition to this the company that does the work in house should enjoy better quality control and more control over the amount of service time that is lost. Higher quality should result in operational savings that can often be hard to quantify in the short term. I have to wonder if these factors were ever added in by CIO when he talks about outsourcing being 20% cheaper? You would hope that our representatives would make such arguments in our behalf to the company.
There is more to the "cost" than simply what the carrier pays per manhour. Many of the "costs" continue to add up as the aircraft is in being overhauled such as lease payments, depreciation, loss of use, etc.
The sad part about all of this is that Tulsa failed to realize line maintenance could have been used to their advantage in a way the benefitted both of us. While they threw all those threats at TULSA, Tulsa forgot that the strike threat is just as valid as it was two years earlier when the company matched NWA. We could still shut them down. We knew this, thats why the line rejected the concessions by a wide margin. Only 17 mechanics out of JFK voted yes, and two of our mechanics are International Reps (Bobby Gless and Levere Deane).
Most airlines do their own line maintenance. The only airline that I knew of that outsourced all of their line maint was Peoples Express. Probably because of our typically cynical nature and People's cult-like corporate culture. We simply would not fit into Peoples culture. This same inherent individualist nature that inhibits our unionism.
As far as I know they always contracted out all their overhaul.
However Peoples Express became known as Peoples distress. Part of the problem was that the subcontractor and its mechanics had no link to the company or its vision. This was likely true of both the overhaul provider and line maint provider. It was in their best interest to find a way to keep the airplane in work so they could bill the carrier more and the mechanics could make more money on OT.
When you look at maintenance costs and then break it down, labor is only a component of that cost. While wage cuts can show apparently tangible savings the lower morale that the cut causes is much harder to measure but when all the other costs are added in could end up costing more than the savings many times over.
Lets look at line maintenance. If an airplane breaks down, and the mechanics working it are unmotivated it could be quite possible that the aircraft may be out of service for a considerably longer amount of time than if the workforce had more of a "can do" attitude. The $50/day saved in wages for the entire station could be a fraction of the lost revenue from just one unfixed airplane that becomes a "hangar Queen". This would not be a deliberate act, but more likely from a lack of intertest. For instance, when the guys are motivated they are more likely to volunteer and take a peek into what is going on, if he came across a similar problem he might share his experience which could lead to a saved trip, even his thought process can be greatly affected by morale, when morale is down, the same mechanic will limit his interest, which may be limited to going through the motions to cover himself more than get the thing back in service as quickly as possible.
The finished product will (or should) be the same, just when its finshed is what changes, and in this business, that makes all the difference. An airline that loses a billion dollars in revenue, plus a tarnished reputation, because they wanted to save what they thought would be a few million on maint labor costs will likely not survive, look at Pan Am and Peoples Express. Penny wise but dollar foolish. As Gordon Bethune said" You can make Pizza so cheap that nobody will want it".
Shortly after we recieved our raise in 2001 the company was able to eliminate all their OT in aircraft maint while maintaing its schedule, its reliability went up with less hours worked. Some mechanics remarked that at the end of the year their total earnings were around the same, only they got to go home every day. It was a fair bargain. It truly was a Win Win situation. The company got higher productivity and we got better lives.
If you do not think that our current path is one to slow financial ruin it is because you are couped up in your own little world in Tulsa. You guys are in a completely different reality than we are. You need to realize that AA makes its money flying people around from one city to another. Unlike Tulsa, in most of these cities AA is just another airline. If they cant deliver reliable service the best paying customers will go elsewhere. Most of us out on the line have worked for other carriers and know that if AA should pull out, that someone else will fill the void. We have already seen some of our best mechanics quit and either go to Jet-Blue, Continental or leave the industry entirely. Most of us are seriously considering leaving also, and with us goes the experience and skill that helped make AA what it is. Skill and experience are just as important as morale to productivity. They compliment each other.
AA once offered mechanics an early out. It was a disaster, so much experience left that it caused operational problems. Now not only are those close to retirement looking to get out as soon as possible but middle aged mechanics with up to 20 years are trying to get out and many of our younger mechanics will never return. We have guys who quit because they were hoping to get laid off but felt that they would not. Needless to say that the attitude of most of the mechanics is not one that projects that they have any long term interest in the company any more.
Such an enviornment causes a constant decline in productivity and could eventually prove more devastating than the combined effects of 9-11 and the recession.
Sure you guys may agree to work for third party rates thinking that you will save your jobs but its on the line where the bottom line is determined. If we fail out here, it aint going to matter much what you guys do there.
