This is a well written summary from STL chairman
posted on June 23, 2012 07:43
What happened?
This week was a roller coaster for the pilots of American Airlines. What I will attempt to do in this blast is to describe what happened.
A little background; I have been involved in a leadership or negotiating committee role for three (3) chapter 11 contract ratifications and one (1) near chapter 11 (AA 2003), since 1992.
What was presented to the APA Board for ratification was by far, the worst, most incomplete and irresponsible contract proposal I have ever seen. What was actually voted on failed more on what was intentionally unavailable, than from the content within.
On Friday, June 15th, the Company made a last and final best offer to APA in New York during mediated bargaining. The LBFO documents were over ten separate documents, some related, some not. Their form was in no way even close to contract language. Major contract areas were defined by single sentences or only a paragraph. Some versions were not accurate to the last state of bargaining or conflicted with other proposed documents.
The APA Board arrived on Monday afternoon to review the proposed agreement. What happened was many of those documents were still in various stages of negotiation. Some of the final documents were not even drafted yet and ended up not being available for board review until only minutes before the vote.
To describe the actual vote as chaotic would be an understatement. As the vote was imminent, it was realized that most of the Board did not even have complete or current versions of all the documents that we were voting on.
In the end, there were 11 total documents. The board had only reviewed 7 of them while in session prior to the vote. One document was still being negotiated as the vote was taking place.
Some examples of substantial contractual areas that lacked adequate detail were Pref Bidding and reserve rules. The Company was proposing to implement Pref Bidding with only one sentence of contractual language. Reserve Rules were only a few sentences leaving gaping questions on how it would be implemented. As written, the company would be able to require airport standby’s, no reasonably available, pretty much complete company discretion on how over 25% of our workforce is administered.
What was proposed to us was either, clearly, bad faith bargaining or gross incompetence. AA and APA have been negotiating for 6 years. It is unthinkable that the company did not have in their possession, basic or skeletal language on such important areas as reserve rules and pref bidding.
Why was the language omitted?
For the APA to approve a new 6-year collective bargaining agreement on what was proposed to us would have been an act of gross negligence.
AA has requested and received approval for a 1-week delay in the 1113© decision. The APA Board will reconvene next week to review what has been promised to be, more complete and robust proposals.
As soon as this next week is complete, we will be scheduling a series of domicile meetings to give you a detailed account of where are and where we are going.
