Another source that you cannot label as promoting outsourcing.
One of the biggest areas airlines can cut costs is maintenance. Consider this: If an airline fixes its own planes in the U.S., it spends up to $100 per hour for every union mechanic, including overhead and other expenses, according to industry analysts. The airline spends roughly half as much at an independent, nonunion shop in America. And it spends only a third as much in a developing country, such as El Salvador.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113877784
Oh, the story also quotes only the TWU and AA as working to keep AMT work in the US. Not AMFA, not AMP, not IBT, not IAM, etc...the TWU. The union that apparently sucks. Almost all those others have done what? Fight the old fashioned way and lost in BK court or through giving in. Once the work is gone, it's gone. Should the TWU tell AA to shove it up their tails will see you on the picket line or BK court like these other guys?
But the complaint now coming from both American Airlines and the president of the Transport Workers Union is that the FAA needs to give maintenance facilities south of the border the same aggressive inspections they endure in the U.S.
Luis, the union president, says the FAA is looking over American mechanics' shoulders all the time in Tulsa. He wants it to be the same way for their competitors.
Maintenance facilities overseas should "have to go through ... the same scrutiny as a maintenance base in the United States," he says. "[That includes] drug testing, alcohol testing and all the compliance that we have to follow."
American Airlines' executives say that keeping their maintenance in-house is a smarter and safer strategy.
But both the union and American's management say that if other airlines are allowed to escape strict federal oversight of their maintenance operations overseas and pay lower wages, what's left of the domestic repair industry will slowly die.
