Nightwatch said:
The AMFA membership has suffered an over 50 per cent reduction in headcount since 2001. http://www.amfa9.org/newsupdates.htm
*taken from AMFA local 9...did AMFA fail the membership there as you all state the TWU did here?
[post="197019"][/post]
Well NW you claim that you have been in this industry a long time. Well if thats the case then you must have seen layoffs before. Remember 81 or 82, around the time of Patco, you know when the AFL-CIO did nothing to help the Air Traffic Controllers? I remember guys from UAL that had over 25 years coming over to Capitol to work. Well this is one of those times again, sure its a bit different but every cycle is a little different. The only thing was that back then they were a little smarter, they did not gut the contract in exchange for the false promise of "saving jobs". When the good times come back, so will the shortage of mechanics, the only thing is we will either be locked into a concessionary contract or we will be so far behind we can never catch up anyway. You have to remember that with the 25% cut in compensation we need twice that to get a back to where we started.
The union you are defending is the same one that helped put your old employer out of business, sure poor management had a lot to do with it but so did things like SRPs, B-scale, Employee paid medical, prefunding, losing the first year towards your pension, no benifits for the first year etc. The fact is that AA could have afforded to pay us more, but if they did they would not have had the competative edge to put EAL, Pan Am and TWA out of business. The TWU made it possible, in fact they even justify their concessionary habit by claiming that "If we did not give AA all those concessions they would not have hired you, those concessions helped AA grow and that growth created your job"-Ed Koziatek 2000. Yea, like the fact that more and more people fly had nothing to do with creating jobs.
You see the TWU was in a position to get more from AA, and if they did it would have helped all airline workers, but then all the airlines would have grown at around the same rate, in other words the IAM and other unions would have grown too. The TWU did not want that, they wanted to make sure that the TWU grew at any expense. You see the growth was neccissary to provide our International officers their perks. TWU officers make as much as officers from super large unions like the Teamsters and the SEUI, despite the fact that TWU members are among the lowest paid union members, certainly lower than other union workers doing the same type of work. Over the last four years the IAM has lost 25% of their membership, while the TWU has grown.
