Originally Posted by
Dharma
Not accurate.
All Board members have a fiduciary duty to recuse themselves if they have a conflict of interest. If a Board member also sits on another company's board, and Delta has a relationship with that company, it is appropriate for that Board member to recuse himself from those discussions. Section 1.L. describes our Board members interaction and access. Everyone should read it.
Your second sentence above is completely not accurate. Our Board member gets info that the MEC is not allowed, and could be a threat to ALPA. In that case, the release of that info to the MEC is governed by Section 1.L.1.b. The underlined part indicates how its distribution is restricted. Here's a quote:
...the Pilot Member may from time to time, with the knowledge of the Chairman of the Delta Board or Chief Executive Officer of Delta, exercise his reasonable discretion to provide such information to the Delta MEC, its officers, relevant committees, and advisors who have executed confidentiality agreements approved by Delta for that purpose.
I get the impression that you are trying to minimize the value of the full-time, voting ALPA member on the Delta Board. If that is your point, I think it's ridiculous and naive. Virtually every labor group in the world would like to have the interaction with company decision makers we have.
Furthermore, if the MEC puts someone in that position and he breaks the law by disclosing SEC confidential info, he'll find himself in jail.
This is exactly why his information is useless or censored. To give the impression that our board member is on equal footing with the other board members is disingenuous. If any of this "proprietary information" were disclosed and was actionable, the union would be in a very difficult position to act on that information.
Was our board member aware of the plan to borrow $2B to fund the pension? What committees does he serve on? Audit? Compensation? How did he vote on the last several dividend increases? Where does he stand on $5B in stock buy backs? Will he support another authorization when the current one is fulfilled in June?
From the 2016 10-K:
Capital Returns to Shareholders.
Since 2013, our Board of Directors has implemented three programs to return capital to shareholders through quarterly dividends and share repurchases. Since first implementing our quarterly dividend in 2013, we have increased the dividend per share by 50% annually and paid $1.2 billion in total dividends, including $509 million in 2016. Through dividends and share repurchases, we have returned nearly $7.4 billion to shareholders since 2013, while reducing outstanding shares by approximately 14% compared to the beginning of 2013. During 2016 alone, we repurchased and retired 60 million shares at a cost of $2.6 billion.