Well, most of the arbitration’s have been due to language from the original CBA from the late 90’s, and before the bankruptcy. They’ve never had a full section six rewrite of the whole CBA. It’s always a stinking limited number of items amendment round. Wasn’t my choice either, I wanted the full rewrite or nothing... but back then NY and DFW MEC votes weren’t enough without some of the others. We had 16 reps on the MEC for 7 bases plus the schoolhouse. Only 15 were voting members.

The language has gotten better, but AMR/AAG got more aggressive at arguing over things that were really not subject to interpretation, but they argued it anyway. I always thought part of it was just to bust our budget. It was effective.