The recent near merger with UAL and the deal’s subsequent collapse, serves Continental line pilots as a deciphering code to be able to take an open book look into CAL management philosophy, but even more importantly ALPA agenda at the national level.
Primarily, it shows that our senior management is sound and still acting responsibly in a very challenging era of U.S. airline history. From a position of investment analysis, UAUA has been a bad buy for a long time. In the current environment of fuel price uncertainty, oil price fluctuations alone seem to be driving airline stock prices. Recently, predictable daily moves in airline stock valuations can often be forecast with reasonable accuracy. Price moves are more or less directly attributable and inversely proportional to what ever happens in fuel futures trading pits.
If fuel prices were to stabilize and become less news worthy, managerial action would once again become the more important facet of stock valuation in fuel related sector stock analysis (airlines). For the time being however, fuel price hype provides a dizzying haze, an environment where managerial error and omissions become secondary. Our senior management team and the CAL BOD have seen through that haze and avoided a merger with UAL. ALPA however, has not.
Regardless of whether or not you are inclined to believe that ALPA suffers from the dues loss of US airways, you must see that “at all costs, no more rank losses†becomes the ALPA mantra. If one more of the major ALPA airlines (most obviously UAL or NW) were to become defunct by persisting with inept business plans, antiquated airplanes and head strong egomaniacal management, ALPA would suffer to the point of becoming ineffective & cash starved. It is therefore in ALPA’s best interest to insure a merger goes through concerning these two most obvious crippled players. A loss of one or both of these large ALPA airlines because of bankruptcy liquidation, would take thousands of the highest paid dues contributors off of ALPA’s tithe list.
Enter the CAL pilots. It is imperative for CAL pilots to understand how National ALPA's agenda is a threat to every CAL pilot's job security. As we’ve been saying for months, someone is going to get hurt here. Allow us to be frank, pilots are going to get furloughed and airplanes will be parked for a long time, maybe forever. ALPA national doesn’t care who those pilots are, so much as they don’t want it to happen via bankruptcy liquidation. They would much rather help administrate large furloughs at new combined mega carriers that have solid ALPA ranks, than deal with the loss of an entire pilot group and have questionable support in the ranks of the airlines left standing.
Enter ALPA executive vice president Chris Lynch who just so happens to be a Continental “captainâ€. Mr. Lynch is about as far removed from a line pilot as Mr. Kelner is distant from a baggage handler or a tug driver. A review of Captain Lynch’s staffing for the month of April indicates an odd, 5 line matrix, of personal, company and union leave. He basically hasn’t flown the line with any regularity since the waning days of the 747. Your dues money has paid Mr. Lynch to sit in on recent MEC meetings. This is National ALPA and John Prater’s way of not so subtly steering CAL ALPA’s agenda. They dictate to the pilots. Remember, Mr. Lynch has been named in every trip loss abuse investigation report we have had. He has also been a major player in the negotiation of CBA’02. ALPA and Mr. Prater have an agenda. That agenda is to save ALPA at all cost. If there are CAL pilot as collateral damages, so be it. So? They send a representative.
During the last MEC meeting, some of our reps were trying to protect our pilots in a merger with UAL. Why is a national ALPA officer even in attendance? Allegedly; Chris Lynch stood up and scolded these reps while presenting ALPA’s view "…its now about all 11,000 pilots not just us. Get it through your heads…†While scolding our MEC, Mr. Lynch is saying we should willingly sacrifice CAL pilots for the good of ALPA. Allowing UAL to have their way with our seniority list would effectively have done just that. Call your rep and ask them exactly what Mr. Lynch said (or meant) and what they are going to do about it. This merger “window of opportunity†hasn’t fully closed yet, so threats still exist. UAL is ALPA and ALPA is UAL.
At the same time Mr. Jim Brucia is on board with team Prater/Lynch. Working for the good of the association, we believe his actions are not in the best interests of the CAL pilots. Mr. Brucia has been very open about his personal seniority as it would have related to a UAL merger. If we correctly understand the thought process, he has publicly espoused the opinion that his ‘81 hire date should go ahead of a UAL '78 hire because UAL had furloughed some of these pilots in the late 70's.
This follows a very familiar and dangerous sentiment expressed by many of the CAL pilots who did not honor ALPA’s 1983 strike. They claimed (in court and crew rooms) that the CAL strikers should go behind those who worked through the strike, because strikers were on strike and therefore not on the property. Does ALPA policy now say you can be harmed in a merger because of a past furloughs? What about our pilots who were on furlough in the 90’s, should they now go behind the UAL pilots? Is Mr. Brucia going to throw our pilots under the bus for the good of the association and his management friends? An obvious conflict of interests seems to be a recurrent theme in our union representation.
The opinion has been espoused that the rest of us will be subject to "relative" seniority and might have had pilots from UAL go ahead of CAL pilots out of date of hire order. In other words to hell with the pilots on the list below a certain level. So long as the top and PEX management friends don’t get harmed, what happens to the rest, happens.
Recent LEC and MEC meetings follow a similar pattern. Mr. Brucia stands at these meetings and tells us that we have to trust him and that is the way it is going to be, yet tells us little of substance and wants to hear nothing from our pilots. There is seldom if ever a desire for input from the pilots on what protections we would like to insure, rather a dictation to line pilots on how its going to be. No one pilot should have that much power. Mr. Brucia might be capable of doing a good job, but we can‘t stress enough how dangerous it would be to unleash any individual alone on an unsupervised task of seniority integration. Egos aside, we feel Mr. Brucia needs to be removed from merger responsibilities for the good of the group. His replacement should be an individual with the vision of protecting ALL CAL pilots.
Mr. Brucia was the neutral in the USAIR merger and wrote the dissenting opinion favoring the USAIR pilots. Now he would have to take the opposite position to defend our pilots. How can he now do this after publicly taking the position he has in the USAIR merger? Don't forget Mr. Katz, the attorney for the losing side of that merger, is also our retained attorney. Courts and arbitrators weigh heavily similar situations in similar cases, “precedent setting casesâ€.
Our opinion is that Mr. Brucia should never have taken part in US/AW merger proceedings with the pressure on CAL to find a merger partner. He has gone on public record and that could possibly hurt CAL pilot’s positions in the future. His involvement in the USAirways merger was not about us, but about his personal side work. It now becomes the task of the CAL pilots to separate ourselves from Mr. Brucia’s part time, precedent setting work.
CAL pilots have dodged a merger bullet for now. Don't think for one minute its over. Lets also remember the sacrifices we’ve made and continue to make. Those sacrifices have made CAL the success it now is. UAL is a mess and should be treated that way in a merger. ALPA however, wants us to treat them as an equal. Bring this to the attention of your reps. Demand your dues be spent on what is best for the CAL pilots and not for the good of ALPA or UAL.
