AdAstraPerAspera said:
And Rock Solomon, he's got his own agenda... Mostly to appoint his family cronies as APFA attorneys
That comment puts you at the same level as those who post about Laura Gladding being related to people in management and going to management weddings and stuff.
Business publications praising Union leaders isn't exactly very comforting.
I think overall Laura did a good job steering the APFA through BK. You make your decisions based on the info available at the time, and past experience. Signing a deal to go into binding arbitration probably seemed reasonable at the time, especially after having recently going through four years of negotiations only to see AA jump into BK with $5 billion in cash.
The decision to support the merger at any cost was probably driven more by emotion than logic, and since the APFA is a democratic Union it cant all be pinned on her, unlike the TWU where Little made the call without any input from those elected by the members.
I cut those deals because I wanted to save the company," she said. "Our attendants love the company. We need to save the company. I don't think we can survive without this."
Save the company from what? They had shed $10 billion in debt, had $5 billion in cash and secured financing for over 500 new planes.
Since mergers typically mean fewer competitors and higher profits , but fewer potential employers for workers, if a Union is to support a merger it makes no sense at all to support a merger without ensuring that some of the gains from the mergers reach the members.
As an outsider where I think she screwed up, and due to the structure of the APFA it's not really fair to pin it all on her, is agreeing to a five year deal and locking themselves into what comes out to around 3% increases over the entire term of the deal with concessions that will mean in real terms her members will be earning less at the end of this deal than they are now (pursers and those with premiums would be making more but the majority would be worse off) .
Laura knew, or at least the info was available to her, that in court AA as a stand alone carrier with even more competitors in the Industry was claiming they would be making nearly $3 billion a year in profits. She probably didn't believe them, once again, fair enough. The difference is that these numbers were being put before the court and the creditors, not vendors(which we as workers are) in a negotiation over contract terms. For some reason when Parker used those same numbers it was more believable and she endorsed the merger. With the merger come not only internal synergies, but industry consolidation which generally means even higher profits. Yet despite all that the APFA negotiating team agreed to what is a one time boost now, which is less than what they gave up in a one time cut in 2003 with much much smaller increases the remainder of the contract, with no means to recover whats been lost over the last 15 years no matter how many billions in profits AA pulls down, they agreed to extend the deal suffered under BK for an extra year with a company that right out of the box is earning record profits.
Can anyone here claim that the majority of Flight Attendants in 2019 would be as well off in real terms under the rejected TA as the majority of Flight attendants were in 2002, even half way there?
AA will be, in fact they will likely be better off than they ever were, so will their upper management.
The article left out a few major points.
AA was not in bad shape when they went into BK, they were already poised to show profits and had drastically lowered their debt, had secured funding for over 500 new aircraft which would lower their fuel and maintenance costs. They went into BK for one reason, they could not get their pilots to agree to concessions. So they screwed us all, don't blame the pilots though, they were right to not give concessions and they were right to get 15% of the Equity.
AA never claimed that they were in imminent financial danger, they spoke of long term problems securing Capital that may or may not have ever materialized(keep in mind they were claiming this six months after securing finance for the largest order of new aircraft ever, and after posting losses or minimal profits in the 9 years preceding the deal.
AA had $5 billion in cash when they filed.
AA made their creditors 100% whole in BK, many of those creditors have been made way beyond 100%. If they were in such bad shape then creditors would not have been made whole. In 'real? bankruptcy cases creditors only get pennies on the dollar, that only applied to workers at AA. Our Corporate Media never looks too closely at the facts, and a Business publication would be even further to the right than the rest of Corporate media.
