Atlas Air and its Senior Vice President Flight Operations Captain Jeffrey Carlson stooped to new lows in their April 7 letter to you. They continue to desperately spin false information without trying to maintain even a modicum of consistency or truthfulness.

Captain Carlson states that AAWW has “completed” its acquisition of Southern Air Inc. and Florida West International Airways. Neither Captain Carlson nor AAWW explain what they mean when they say that the acquisition has been completed. It likely only means that the shareholders have voted to approve the acquisition. If that is all it means, that isn’t much.

It remains our understanding that the Department of Transportation is still evaluating and has not yet granted approval of AAWW’s request for approval of its request for the de facto transfer of its subsidiary carriers’ route authorities. This may be because the DOT, like many others, is concerned that the AAWW-SAI acquisition gives too much control over U.S. carriers by foreign entities – in this case, DHL and LAN Cargo.

The AAWW-SAI acquisition is much more complicated than Captain Carlson and AAWW’s Bill Flynn and John Dietrich have explained to the shareholders and the public. Shareholder approval of an acquisition based on incomplete information regarding those complexities attempts to strip the pilots of our contractual and statutory rights and protections, including our right to negotiate for amended collective bargaining agreements pursuant to the Railway Labor Act.

Captain Carlson’s attempted plea to you concerning the Atlas/Polar CBA successor and merger provisions in CBA Section 1 is full of inaccuracies that have no bearing on what actually is playing out. Captain Carlson says that AAWW intends to pursue a full operational merger of Atlas and Southern and that we are contractually required to terminate our RLA Section 6 contract negotiations and enter into a “finite process” to merge the labor contracts. He states that, after going through a “finite period” of direct negotiations, submitting all unresolved bargaining issues to binding arbitration, where a third-party arbitrator will impose terms on us (without any right for crew members to ratify or reject the terms negotiated) is somehow a fair way to merge multiple contracts that are very different from one another. What Captain Carlson means is that AAWW and its airline subsidiaries intend to obstruct the “finite period” of direct negotiations by refusing to agree to terms and then force a binding arbitration on us, knowing that an arbitrator will most likely impose contractual terms upon you. That is precisely what AAWW did with respect to our current contract and what they want to impose again. His goal and that of this management group is to continually deny us our legal rights to negotiate a CBA.

Captain Carlson and AAWW say that the Atlas contract requires this punitive process; however, he and AAWW are incorrect. The contract does not contemplate, let alone require, that we terminate our RLA Section 6 negotiations and submit to a bargaining charade that Captain Carlson has repeatedly stated is designed to force an arbitration and arbitrator-imposed terms on us. The CBA contemplates a complete operational merger of two carriers. AAWW has informed us that it intends to operationally merge the SAI companies consisting of three holding companies (SAI, Worldwide Air Holdings and Florida West International Holdings) and two carriers (Southern Air and Florida West) into its own holding company (AAWW) and its two certificated carriers (Atlas and Polar). The complexity of the corporate transaction is further compounded by the fact that two separate unions represent the affected pilots, namely the Teamsters and the management-friendly Florida West Pilots Association. When Captain Carlson tells you that management is merely following contractually required procedures, please keep in mind that they are not reading the contract as a whole, but are instead reading excerpts that Captain Carlson and management find convenient.

Captain Carlson has told us that they do not have any idea how AAWW intends to fit Florida West into its operational merger. That is a critical piece of intentionally withheld information. How on earth can management claim in one breath that the acquisition has been completed and that we now have to integrate three separate seniority lists into one and merge three separate contracts into one when, in the next breath, the company says it does not know how Florida West will even fit into the mix? Your guess is as good as mine, but we can be sure that whatever the answer is, AAWW is up to no good for us, our jobs, and our contract.

And that may explain why Captain Carlson seems to be running far away from the term “amalgamation.” Captain Carlson says that the term “amalgamation” in not found in the Atlas and Southern contracts. Captain Carlson is correct that our CBA does not use the term “amalgamation.” The terms “amalgamation” and “merger” mean the same thing. Even if Captain Carlson does not know that, he is contradicting his boss. AAWW CEO Bill Flynn told the AAWW shareholders during the February 18, 2016 earnings call: “our goal is to merge Southern into Atlas, we will amalgamate Southern into Atlas and at the end of that process there will be one collective bargaining agreement and all pilots will be Atlas pilots.”

The term “amalgamation” is avoided because Captain Carlson is trying to make you forget that our current contract is the product of the same contract amalgamation process he and AAWW’s management team so desperately want to impose. He knows that the pilots are dissatisfied with the current amalgamated contract and he wants to trick us into thinking that AAWW’s current strategy of forcing a “merger” of multiple contracts is somehow going to produce the same results as a Section 6 negotiation.

While he tries to split and misuse words, Captain Carlson also lays another whopper out there, namely that the current amalgamated CBA contains arbitrator-imposed terms only with respect to a few “minor” issues, including Scope (job protection). We have heard this nonsense from his boss John Dietrich before. As you all know, Scope is not a minor issue. Along with scheduling and compensation, it forms the very foundation of our contract and greatly influences and protects our careers and our profession. The company forced the arbitrator to decide the scope provisions in our current contract, and it is should be no surprise to anyone that the arbitrator imposed very weak and outdated scope. Ironically, as weak as those scope provisions are, Captain Carlson and AAWW are not even willing to abide by them. The process is far more complicated than Captain Carlson and AAWW would have you believe. Captain Carlson and AAWW’s strategy is to force the same contractual terms upon us through an arbitration which is fraught with the same complicated and punitive issues. Their strategy does not provide a “clear and expeditious” path toward an “expeditious deal.” To the contrary, they promote a process that is long and detrimental all of us.

The union has twice presented AAWW with proposals to realistically achieve the “expeditious deal” that it says it wants, and AAWW has twice rejected them unilaterally. Captain Carlson says our proposals were not in the best interests of AAWW and its shareholders and that we undervalued the cost of those proposals by a factor of four. We strongly disagree and believe that AAWW is intentionally inflating the cost of our proposals by a factor of four. We have requested that Atlas’ financial experts provide us with data to support their claims and to sit down with our own financial experts to reconcile any costing differences. AAWW has refused to provide any financial data to us and our financial experts, despite the fact that fully executed non-disclosure agreements have been in place for quite a long time. I can only conclude that Captain Carlson and AAWW prefer to hide the truth.

And that is exactly what Captain Carlson leaves you with in his letter. He concludes by stating that, “Atlas values the significant contributions that each of you continue to make to the Company’s success and ongoing growth. Your new collective bargaining agreement should be the result of direct negotiations and will recognize your efforts by providing higher wages, continued quality health and welfare benefits, and enhanced quality of life provisions for all Atlas and Southern pilots.” These words are from the same person who has told us to our faces that he and AAWW’s objective is to short-circuit and terminate legitimate collective bargaining under RLA Section 6 by forcing us to submit to an arbitration where an arbitrator will impose contract terms on us that will favor the company and harm the pilots and that the pilots cannot even vote upon! Don’t be deceived by empty words; they want to trample your contractual rights and protections. Remember, Atlas has never had a legitimate Section 6 opportunity in its entire history. We must not let that happen, and we must not let them spread misinformation to support their ill-conceived and illegitimate objectives. I ask that you remain ever attentive and be on the lookout for more of same old, tired arguments designed to deceive you and thwart the legitimate Section 6 rights we deserve.

Fraternally,

Bob Kirchner
Atlas Executive Council Chairman
APA Teamsters Local 1224