I was at the hearing today. The TWU told the court that the members will either vote on a TA or the companys last offer before the union hearings (around the middle of May).
Tomorrow the negotiating committee will meet with the company to discuss the full text proposal they handed us last week. After reviewing the proposal and listening to the company claim they want a consentual agreement I had to bite my tongue. Here they are claiming that they are willing to negotiate while in the meantime making it obvious that they do not want a deal. When we reviewed the language we found numerous changes to TAs, in other words we had agreed to one thing but they wrote in something else and claimed it was TA'd, in other articles they completely violated protocol by completely omitting language (normally omitted language has a line through it like
Its amazing how they lie. Sadly they will probably get away with it. The pilots did a great job tearing up the companys, opening statement, they discussed how they had agreed to address those issues that were not consistant with the rest of the industry, but that the companys demands were far and above "necessary". The Pilots cited one of the first BK cases after 1113 was created that occured in Michigan where the criteria for rejection was clarified but Judge Lanes reaction made it pretty clear that Federal Law in Michigan is not the same as Federal Law in the Southern District of New York. Other comments by the Judge reaffirmed my position that we will either have to resort to activity that the courts have made illegal, but only for airline workers, or just resign ourselves to getting screwed. Nothing in what I heard today indicated that Judge Lane will be anything more than a rubber stamp. He has already washed his hands of how his decision will affect us. I guess he figures we will simply obey and comply, too bad he didnt look out the window to see the 700 or so protestors outside.
The Creditors Committee was the last to contribute to the opening statements, they said that they support the companys motion to abrogate the contracts, they also commented something to the effect that they want to wait and see what happens out of negotiations the next few weeks before they render a final opinion on whether or not the court should abrogate the deals. They kept referring to the contracts under the status quo. I assume they were referring to the fact that they may not support managements take it or leave it position on $1.25 billion in concessions and that if the Unions continue to be agreeable to address the issues where AA is at a disadvantage they may not support managements position, but I would not get my hopes up.
One indication of the excess of the companys demands was that they admitted that if they got what they wanted they expected to earn enough profits to pay around $360 million a year in profit sharing. They actually boasted that we could get back as much as 25% of what they want us to give up!! Well that means they expect to turn an annual profit of around $2.4 billion a year. Thats more than the entire Industry makes most years. Thats a 10% profit margin. Pretty much unheard of in any mass transit industry, that clearly does not meet the "necissary for reorganization" criteria however Judge Lanes comments did not leave me with the feeling that in the Southern Distrct Court, right in the heart of Wall Street, that such inconvieneces would get in the way of a good Labor Roast.
