root cause of the problem

[Chaffed]

Article seems to be accurate.

 

[frontline]

I see the root cause as most of our airline competitors being allowed to go bankrupt and throw out their contracts and pensions. That has hurt us badly for the last ten years. Now it is our turn, oh goodie! But it was inevitable once Delta and United filed.

 

[commavia]

Take a look at this chart here: http://www.aa.com/i18n/amrcorp/corporateInformation/facts/structure.jsp . Almost 50 VPs, good god, you've got to be kidding.

It is ridiculous. They need to thin that out big time. AA simply does not need that many VPs. Period. I can think of a few off the top of my head who could be fired tomorrow and it would make absolutely no difference at all to the company's operation, other than to substantially increase morale and improve performance.

It's sort of emblematic of Corporate America, though, in general, and largely just down to the continually diminishing concept of accountability in our society at large: the more people you have with you at the top, the more people you can point fingers at when you screw up. What ever happened to one guy having iron-fist, dictatorial control over something, and taking the victories and the failures that come with it?

That is where AA needs to move: fewer VPs (and MDs, etc.) who are true leaders, empowered to make decisions and supported by senior leaders who know the difference between a mistake made based on smart decisions that didn't pan out and a stupid mistake that should never have been made and is grounds for firing.

Now take a look through there, and point out how many are just fluff jobs for empty suits. The first obvious waste is the "VP of diversity and leadership strategies" position - what a waste, and a complete failure.

Well of course it's an obvious waste - but you know just as well as I do why those positions exist, and why certain positions are filled by certain people. Once again ... welcome to Corporate America! You think AA is at all unique in that regard? Of course not!

All these tools, and they still have to bring in outside consulting groups to tell them how to manage an airline. They better not bring Crandall back, because he would fire every one of them.

Very true.

I see the root cause as most of our airline competitors being allowed to go bankrupt and throw out their contracts and pensions. That has hurt us badly for the last ten years. Now it is our turn, oh goodie! But it was inevitable once Delta and United filed.

A very big part of the equation. When Continental, Delta, Northwest, United, and USAirways have all used bankruptcy at least once, and in some cases more than once, to outsource more of their work, freeze and or dump pensions, cut wages and get more flexible work rules, etc., that put AA at a huge competitive disadvantage. And that's before you even talk about all the other restructuring of their business models that AA's competitors did in bankruptcy, including rejecting uneconomic leases and abandoning unproductive assets. AA, now, is pursuing precisely the same strategy.

I recognize that some one here want to continually go back to a straight comparison of hourly pay, but that misses a big part of the point, which is that AA's labor cost disadvantage (at least versus the other legacy carriers) in recent years was driven largely not by pay scales but by work rules, pension liabilities, and of course the fact that AA's legacy competitors had far fewer people making those pay scales since they long ago outsourced their overhauls, more of their ground handling, more of their flying to regional operators, etc. And, of course, all of that is just if AA benchmarks against the mainline, legacy peers, and doesn't factor in the comparison against lower-cost, often non-union operators like JetBlue, Virgin America, Frontier, etc., with which AA increasingly finds itself competing, nor the lower-paying regional operators that Delta, United and USAirways have outsourced more of their flying to. Look, for example, at Delta's recent buildups in LAX and New York: it is almost entirely being done by regionals. LGA-ORD? AA has 18x daily mainline, Delta: 11x regional. LAX-SFO? AA has 6x daily mainline, Delta: 7x (and soon to be more) regional. In many cases, that is AA (mainline) and AA's employees' new competitor, not the mainline carriers themselves.

 

[TWU informer]

What is amazing is to have ALL OF THOSE VP's, ALL of their underlings on the payroll, and still have to outsource Labor Relations, Legal Help, Fleet Management, and Public Relations, Payroll, ect, ect.

Damn sickening when you think we are the one's footing the bill for both.

 

[Buck]

What is amazing is to have ALL OF THOSE VP's, ALL of their underlings on the payroll, and still have to outsource Labor Relations, Legal Help, Fleet Management, and Public Relations, Payroll, ect, ect.

Damn sickening when you think we are the one's footing the bill for both.

Dock 1D in TUL, now has two managers, one for dayshift and one for afternoon shift. 1 dock 2 managers.

 

[Birdman]

Dock 1D in TUL, now has two managers, one for dayshift and one for afternoon shift. 1 dock 2 managers.

Just what have you guy's done to garner so much attention?

 

[Buck]

Just what have you guy's done to garner so much attention?

Busy I Guess

 

[JFK Fleet Service]

Apparently they do E,all we hear is "How our competitors did__________".