American Airlines wins seniority fight with former TWA flight attendants

[WeAAsles]

American Airlines had no duty to restore the seniority it stripped from TWA flight attendants in a 2001 merger before American merged with US Airways in 2013, a federal appeals court held Tuesday.

 
Although the plight of the former TWA workers was one reason Congress later amended the Federal Aviation Act to address seniority, nothing in the 2007 amendment required airline carriers to 'revisit seniority decisions that preceded the statute's enactment,'" Circuit Judge Raymond Lohier wrote for the panel, which also included Circuit Judge Peter Hall and U.S. District Chief Judge Christina Reiss of Vermont, sitting by designation.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSL2N15W0JM
 

 

[IORFA]

OMG, someone was still wasting their hard earned $$ over this? Man, I guess some people have extra $$ sitting around with nothing to do with it. Why prolong the inevitable? Time to forget and move on.

 

[eolesen]

Yep, some people have to live forever in the past.

 

[bigjets]

OMG, someone was still wasting their hard earned $$ over this? Man, I guess some people have extra $$ sitting around with nothing to do with it. Why prolong the inevitable? Time to forget and move on.

 
How does their lawyer live with himself.

 

[Kev3188]

On a large pile of ca$h...

 

[autofixer]

As always, the attorneys are the winners. 

 

[WeAAsles]

Just curious. What were they expecting to gain from trying to force AA to give them back the company time they had with TWA? Vacations?

It couldn't be Pension accumulations since any way you cut it you actually had to have "vesting hours" to improve the payouts.

 

[WeAAsles]

Ok. Nevermind. I miss Terry Maxon.

http://aviationblog.dallasnews.com/2014/06/ex-twa-flight-attendants-sue-american-airlines-association-of-professional-flight-attendants-over-seniority.html/

 

[diamondcutter]

Just curious. What were they expecting to gain from trying to force AA to give them back the company time they had with TWA? Vacations?
It couldn't be Pension accumulations since any way you cut it you actually had to have "vesting hours" to improve the payouts.

I agree , however this is no an AA problem it's an APFA problem , all it takes is a stoke of a pen by the BOD . It was never fair , and sad to say it will never happen.

 

[WeAAsles]

I agree , however this is no an AA problem it's an APFA problem , all it takes is a stoke of a pen by the BOD . It was never fair , and sad to say it will never happen.

The language of McCaskill-Bond is "unfortunate" for the plaintiffs Loheir conceded, since its passage was "prompted in part by the plight of the flight attendants who were endtailed" in the 2001 TWA merger.
Nonetheless, the law was not passed retroactively, and the plaintiffs can't claim a violation of rights that didn't exist at the time of the alleged violation, the ruling states.
"[McCaskill-Bond] therefore 'did nothing for the very group ... whose misfortunes had given it life,'" Loheir wrote, quoting the original complaint.
Los Angeles attorney Robert Siegel, who represented American Airlines in the appeal, called the ruling "a good, useful decision for lawyers."
"My client ... has no obligation to go back and re-do one of the lists that was formulated over a decade ago," he said during an interview with Courthouse News.
The Second Circuit also rejected the plaintiffs' claim that the union wrongfully "failed to [equally] promote the aggregate welfare of all [of] its members," stating that the union's conduct did not violate the legally accepted definition of "bad faith."
In order to have breached its duty to the flight attendants, the union would have had to "act with an improper intent, purpose or motive" and conduct itself with "fraud, dishonesty and other intentionally misleading conduct," Loheir wrote.
Instead, the opinion says, they simply avoided violating McCaskill-Bond by ensuring that incoming U.S. Air flight attendants were properly integrated into the seniority list without losing their service time.
The fact that they did not insist upon the re-ordering of the American list as it existed before the merger "was not irrational and arbitrary" and did not show bad faith towards the TWA transfers, the ruling said.
The judges also pointed out that moving the TWA employees up in the ranks could simply have exposed the airline and the union to similar claims of unfairness by U.S. Air employees - in other words, someone had to be last on the list, and the union did not arbitrarily choose the plaintiffs to occupy this position.