AMR Scope Proposal to APA
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Negotiations Update - Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Today, management presented APA with a proposal on Section 1 of the contract, Scope.

Under management's Scope proposal, AMR would be permitted to operate jet aircraft of up to 76 seats at commuter carriers, codeshare with other airlines both domestically and internationally with dramatically reduced restrictions, and charter other operator aircraft in order to carry passenger bags. Additionally, the cockpit crewmember floor of 7300 pilots required for the company to exercise the Commuter Exception in the contract would be deleted.

Bargaining Breakdown -- SCOPE
APA Communications Committee: There is little doubt that one of the most important contract issues to pilots is scope. Similar to our compensation, scope is a contractual area where we have seen a steady and unrelenting diminishment. Our scope clause used to be simple: “All flying done by or on behalf of the company will be performed by pilots on the American Airlines seniority list.” Simple and easy to understand. Any flying done for AMR, we do it -- period. That’s not the case anymore…

The years have produced exception after exception. We now have a Commuter Air Carrier exception, a Fixed Base Operator exception, a Hawaiian Inter-Island exception, an Air Freight exception, a Domestic Codeshare exception, and an International Codeshare exception -- a total of 106 paragraphs of contractual scope language. As it relates to scope, everywhere it says, “exception,” you can substitute, “lost flying opportunity.” The exceptions have been won by the management through old-fashioned leverage, industry forces and our own lack of resolve and foresight. Regardless of how they were created, no scope exception has ever benefited the pilot group.

We have said from the inception of the current negotiations that this contract would be about restoration -- not just restoration in terms of pay, but restoration of our profession. A major piece in the restoration of our profession is the restoration of scope. Our scope proposal goes back to the original design and replaces all the exceptions and language with a simple statement.

APA Scope Proposal: All flying performed on behalf of the company or an affiliate shall be performed by pilots on the American Airlines seniority list in accordance with the terms and conditions of this agreement.
While our scope goal is restoration, AMR’s goal goes far beyond further eroding our scope protections to complete decimation of them.

AMR Scope Proposal:

--Allow affiliates (AE) to operate Embraer 170 class aircraft (this passenger jet would have a two-class configuration and 76 seats)

--Eliminate “international baseline” scope protection (would allow AMR unrestricted outsourcing of AA pilot jobs to international carriers through ventures like the proposed virtual merger between AA/BA/IB).

--Eliminate 7,300 cockpit crewmember floor protection of the commuter exception (theoretically, AA could then operate with zero pilots on the AA seniority list).

--Eliminate scope protections on “non-owned” commuter carriers designed to feed mainline hub operations (would allow hub-to-hub flying and allow increased point-to-point flying for AMR by a “non-owned” commuters).