Originally Posted by
alfaromeo
From what I read the judge said:
- American went bankrupt because their network was too small and they did not have enough feed. This has caused a serious revenue problem as the high value customers are abandoning them. Part of the reorganization will be to increase code sharing and RJ flying to fix that (did you read that Mesabah? Your crew room lawyering is once again shown to be wrong)
... and ...
- He does not care if the APA thinks that merging with US Airways is the best course of action, no merger has been agreed to
- The company's witnesses were more credible than the APA's
- Under Chapter 11, necessary changes do not mean the minimum to survive, it means enough changes to create a successful company
The judge's ruling has basically shattered all of the forum ideas about how the APA would prevail.
So you have two options:
- Agree to a crappy contract that contains a substantial claim in the reorganized American. Just to reiterate, the 13% claim that the Delta pilots got from their bankruptcy netted out to $1,300,000,000. That's a lot of zeroes there.
- Accept and even worse contract rejection and get no claim
Financially, there is no choice, Option 1 is the only way to go. Emotionally, if the American pilots feel the need to throw away money in order to make some statement to somebody somewhere, then you can make that choice.
Unfortunately for labor, your conclusions sure appear correct. While it is not surprising a Judge thinks management knows more about running their Company than pilots, it is stunning (at least to me) the way he went through Section 1; opining that only the no furlough clause and international code share were job protection provisions. The rest, it appears, he perceives as purely economic.
I would very much like to have heard the arguments which helped form the Judge's opinion. ALPA, who is advising the APA, has been "monetizing" scope for over a decade now. If the APA has been negotiating job protection provisions with "credits" then they bear responsibility for having established their scope as an instrument of trade. In other words, ALPA and perhaps the APA, have created a marketplace which negated the sacrosanct nature of job protection provisions. Do you agree? Or, is it your position job protection has always been just about the money?
Your opinion is interesting. You see (conservative / effective / tight - pick the adjective) scope as constraining feed. I ask, why couldn't American perform their feed themselves? Isn't that management's decision? TWA had Delta's latest and greatest feed tool; the 717.
... taking it further, with this ruling, what purpose do unions serve pilots? Has union representation become near as can matters similar to the representation provided by a real estate agent, ... selling the family farm for a 2% commission? This near ruling may have been mostly crafted to scare the pilots into meaningful concessions, however, it is "new law" on some of the scope issues that we've been wrestling with.
I'd sure like to read your detailed opinion on the small jet scope side of this deal.