I'm not carrying a torch for the liars at the TWU, but this is one place where I don't think they're lying: The 120 distribution technique wasn't imposed by the TWU - it was imposed on all employee distributions, including the APA, the APFA and the non-union employees. The number of shares to which you're entitled wasn't known until this week, because the stock price for the last 30 days was used to calculate everyone's share of the stock.
I realize that a lot of you posted over and over again that you wanted to see the calculator after each monthly distribution, beginning with the first, but until this week, nobody knew what numbers to program into a calculator to compute the actual number of shares for any employee.
It's unfortunate that you guys had to endure a Ch 11 case with "representation" that has historically been so crappy and incompetent. As I posted here the day that AMR filed for Ch 11, the saddest news for AA's mechanics in bankruptcy was that the worthless union had not yet been replaced by November 29, 2011. Even worse, it's now April 11, 2014 and the $&@&heads are still doing a lousy job for you. But nobody could predict exactly how many shares anyone would be entitled to get until this week. All they could do was estimate and provide some "what-if" numbers. Now that all the variables have actual values we can look up in the stock price records, you can finally compute how many shares you get.
Nobody could predict on December 9, 2013, how much you would weigh this afternoon, as nobody knew how much you'd eat or how much you would diet in those 120 days. Similarly, nobody knew how high (or low) the stock would move or where it would be every 30 days or exactly what each share would be worth this past week.