I heard Bob is riding Star Tours and the Tea Cups
Star Tours-yes, Tea Cups-no, my kids are a little old for that. Would I be better off golfing with management?
Over the past few weeks I've seen many people claim that I've said things I didnt and spin other things I have said.
Here are some things I have said;
"We should have called AA's bluff back in 2003, even if they werent bluffing and had gone BK we would be better off today."
As it is now the industry as a whole is enjoying an advantage over labor that they could have never dreamed possible.
A week before we gave away the store UAL had reached A TA in BK that cut pay by 13% but left most of the contract intact, they actualy got 1% back compared to the temporary court imposed paycut, then we turned around and cut our contract by 25% outside of BK. We lowered the bar. Lets say that we had held the line and rejected the companys demands. Sure maybe they would have filed, well what would we have ended up with? As I said earlier UAL had just come to a TA where they took a 13% paycut, only to be udercut by our 25% paycut outside of BK. So we end up in front of a Judge, UAL had taken their 13% paycut and kept Holidays, Vacation, sick time, IOD time, medical etc etc. We would likely have followed UAL with a 13% paycut as well, but once we undercut the BK process by going all the way to 25% we reset the bar for the whole industry. USAIR had to go back into BK and the rest followed to try and get what we gave AA. None of our competitors had low cost mechanics in OH, OSMs, and with a contracting industry they did not have the opportunity to introduce them in through attrition like AA did, since we gave that concession in 1995. Our competitors would have hade to cut some of their workers pay by around half, and what sort of productivity could they have expected from them? So they really didnt have an option, if they wanted to be able to produce seats at a price comparable to AA they had to outsource.
We are currently the lowest paid mechanics, none of those who preceeded us were at the bottom in compensation when the company asked for more concessions in bk.
If we all had gone BK around the same time we would have had a better arguement at saying the system is flawed and pushing for changes to deregulation, C-11, the RLA or any combination thereof. As it is we find ourselves earning less money today than we did prior to the concessions and the company trying to extend that until at least 2018.
"The greatest threat to our profession is not Foreign Maintenance , its American Airlines."
There will always be maintenance done here in the US. Sure some of the low value work will be sent overseas but in an attempt to keep that work should we all accept less? Some say Yes, some say no. I say NO. Keep it a job worth coming back to,
Some say that if you let jobs go you will never see them come back, well I've seen the opposite, or more precisely I've seen the people come back. The workforce is not static for long. It always shrinks, in order to maintain a staffing level they need to hire workers, so if jobs go away through outsourcing it does not mean that the Junior worker who hits the street has permanently lost his job, (it may mean that the Union has permantly lost some of its dues revenue but is it about the Union treasury or the people?) more than likely he/she will be recalled and that has been the primary reason that Unions pushed for seniority in the workplace. Surpluss labor is nothing new, nor are layoffs, seniority was put in place so the older workers were protected. Everyone who was laid off in Aircraft Maintenance has been offered the opportunity to come back despite the fact that the fleet is 35% smaller. What we have not been able to get back is our wages, Holidays, Vacation, Sick time , IOD, out of pocket medical etc. Some advocate giving up more to save jobs, even though AA has been hiring off the street for nearly a year now. You dont save a job by destroying the pay and benefits that drew us here in the first place. No matter what we give up jobs will be lost when the old planes go away and new ones show up. Some may be okay with taking less, more than likely they are the ones at the bottom who have never been through this process before or are afraid of having to look for a job but they can either get laid off and hope to come back to a good job or make this a crappy one before they get laid off and have nothing to come back to. Maybe their fears are unfounded, maybe they arent but there are no guarantees in life, when you made the decision to go into this industry wasnt it with the expectation that you would enjoy a certain standard of living? Did you think that just because you got your licenece it would be handed to you? You have to be willing to fight for it. That means saying NO to concessions everytime the company threatens you.
We only have a certain amount of input into this process, whether you are a Member or even a Local President or va "small Local". We can vote NO. If it was up to me I would have asked for a release back in August of 2009. But I do not have the authority to do so. The fact is this is the Internationals Contract, not any Locals, not even Tulsa's. Within the committee I had patiently waited for the 7 day labor loan and 1/7th rule issues to get settled before I made a concerted effort to push for release. I made motions to do so as far back as April of 2010 only to be outvoted. Even when the NMB had withdrawn from the process many still did not want to ask for a release, I wanted to request that we ask in time for a Pre-Thankgiving expiration of the 30 day cooling off period, the day after they filed BK was settled upon. We still have not officially asked for a release.
BTW, back in August the NMB (Larry Gibbons) told us one of the reasons why they were pulling out was because they did not feel that further mediation would help and that due to the govermnents fiscal difficulties he did not want to waste any more of their money, yet, since this process began he has been there, hanging out with his buddy Mark Burdette (they both have a conncetion through AIRCON) pretty much every day.
What we need to do is attck the process and we should focus our arguement on the unfairness of our exclusion from section 1167 of the BK code. Airline workers are on the one hand told they can not avail themselves of their economic weapons because of the RLA yet they are not protected from the companys decision to avail themselves of C-11 like other workers who also have their hands tied-Railroad workers. If you work under the NLRA and your contract is abrogated you can do like every other creditors and cease to provide what you were contractually bound to provide. You can strike. If you are a Railroad worker they can not abrogate your contract, they have to follow section 6 of the RLA, however if you are an airline worker you are denied the right to strike that NLRA workers have and are not protected by Sect 1168 like RR workers. Clearly this is an intolerable injustice. It was assumed that since we did not get the protections of the RLA, namely 1167, that we would have the right to strike as if we were under the NLRA, but some Judge decided that we should have niether. This is something that every airline worker needs to be aware of since it will affect them. What the courts have done is tip the scales in favor of stripping airline workers unions of all their economic weapons while adding them to our employers. The exploitation of C-11 provodes no stigma nad has become an accepted business practice that robs Unions of a level playing field. When USAIRWAYS filed there was little doubt that the company was failing, when NWA filed with $1 billion in cash it raised eyebrows but NWA could point not only tpo how competitors used BK to lower costs but how AA, the largest carrier at the time had much lower wages and benefits, they pushed the bar over a little to the right, establishing that an airline need not be broke to use C-11, now AA is pushing it over even more, filing with over $ billion in the bank and retaining its plan to replace most of its aircraft over the next several years leaving them with the newest fleet in the industry, Hostess foods has pushed it over even more recently, filing for c-11 to just go after labor contracts.
C-11 has becaome the means by which companies will simply use the courts to get what they could not get in collective bargaining. Clearly Unions will have no purpose unless challenges are put up against this. If we allow AA to be successful in gutting whats left of our contsracts while they are still taking delivery of new aircarft and have billions in cash then why wouldnt AA's competitors do the same thing AA did? USAIR is in negotiations, UAL comes up next year, so does WN. Why wouldnt they drag out talks for four years like AA then, place an order for hundreds of new aircraft on the books, right next to even more than $4 billion in cash and file BK to go after the labor contracts. While all unions face the prospect of a company imposing terms after negaotiaions have reached an impasse only airline workers face having terms imposed and not being able to legally fight back.
Everyone has the God given right to defend themselves. If we are to survive we must do so, regardless of its legality, so yes, I am saying that if we have terms imposed on us by the courts who are answerable to no one then we should resort to what under these terms are considered to be illegal job actions, non-violent, non-destrctive acts of civil disobedience meant to cause as much disruption to commerce as possible. We should also, as soon as possible make our grievances known to our elected leaders. ask them to avoid putting us in this position by including us in 1167, they allowed the courts to screw us, they can correct it before it gets to the point where working people have to resort to lawlessness in order to protect themselves. This concerns
all airline workers so we should all do this, because if we dont you will be next. We failed to do it in 2003, there is no "next time", we have to do it this time, even if it means the liquidation of AA.
