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. -- There were two choices. Go with a standalone AA or go with a merger and agree with the Creditors who wanted cost certainties as the Plan of Reorganization would have given them. In that situation, it would be foolish to walk away.
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. --It makes more logical sense to have a merger within BK, than to deal with such a situation after the BK and especially when it would have meant the unions at AA would have to swallow the 20% cuts, rather than the 17% cuts.
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. --Thankfully they had cash on hand when they filed. Unlike yourself, I'd rather see them go into BK with a cushion rather than needing to find financing to pay their bills within the BK process. When a company has to file and get Debtor In Possession (DIP) financing the lender dictates the First Day Orders which usually comes with immediate pay and benefit cuts. You option would be that they burn through that cash then file for BK and have the need for DIP, ridiculous.
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. --The gains are reaching the Members. There were less cuts in BK, there were raises from US Airways and there is another opportunity to gain in another JCBA. To have merger after the BK would mean we didn't get the raises from US Airways, we would be saddled with bigger cuts than we took in BK, the airline would have to take on more debt in order to finance a merger. Once the merger happens, if it happens, the extra debt load would certainly curtail any possible gains we could make otherwise.
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) . -- The duration of the CBA is not going to be negotiable. Again, it was a requirement of the creditors committee to ensure the POR would be for the allotted time giving them a change to make the biggest gains possible. To be mired in contract negotiations for years, like UA, was not welcoming. As it stands, with the merger Glading was able to lower the total percentage of ask for Members while at the same time opening the possibility of making more gains well before the 6 year mark of the POR.
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. -- And there is the fall back. 2003. When all else fails let use 2003 as a mechanism to try and make a point of where we are today. Tried and failed mantra of 2008, "Restore and More." A flight attendant group that has been out of BK for less than a year had raises in the failed contract that would have brought them to industry leading or close to it. After 11 years of no raises, no movement forward it takes a special person to point out that the movement forward is nothing more than a mirage. It is better to stay where we are and fight, even if that fight is take years. Let's no grow organically, no, let's try to force the issue and if we wait long enough we will succeed....Except, that blueprint has not worked. It was tried in 2008 and failed, all other proposals after that were worse than the originally. Actually, it was a three year deal, but after saying no...we were still fighting three years later. Then came the BK. At that point, you believed a liquidation was the way to go. =/
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? -- That's the goal then. Nothing is good enough until we reach the levels prior to 2003 in one contract negotiations. If we can't get it one contract negotiations then we need to hold out even if it means we go to a Presidential Emergency Board in 2018 and force the President and Congress to deal with us or we will strike and shut down the entire transportation system of the United States.
AA will be, in fact they will likely be better off than they ever were, so will their upper management. --They already are.
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. -- No, don't blame the pilots. They did us a favor by forcing a BK which led to us to giving up 17% of our CBA. It was for a good cause. Now we have them exactly where we want them.(?) The airline wasn't in bad shape, the debt was made up or they were hiding the real numbers. (If you believe that is true then you can't want to force profit sharing as part of a deal because we know they "make believe" they have money problems....amazing how your arguments intersect each other).....................Ridiculous!
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. ..And $29B in debt. (minor detail, I guess)
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. --I guess the fact that the added value of a merger helped all creditors make bigger gains than they would otherwise would normally make, is another fact that is not closely scrutinized.
....But luckily, we have Bob to get us on the right track because corporate media, business publications, union leadership, financial advisers, court officers and anyone else that goes against how the world works according to Bob, must be suspect.
