"MEC Chairman’s Message
February 8, 2008
This is MEC Chairman Jack Stephan with a chairman’s message to the pilots for Friday, February 08, 2008.
After nine days of talks between the US Airways and America West Steering Committees, the America West contingent has chosen to stand down talks. At this time they are not prepared to address seniority implementation issues, specifically, mitigating the damages caused by the Nicolau Award.
Recall that we met to determine if we had enough common ground between us on important issues to come up with a comprehensive counterproposal for both MECs to review. As we told you, this counterproposal would have to adequately address not only all open JNC issues, but more importantly for the AAA pilots, pay parity and seniority protection. We came to the neutral site at Wye River, MD with these goals in mind, and within these goals we developed certain thresholds needing to be achieved for the benefit of the US Airways pilots. Despite what you may have heard or read, none of that changed during the meeting.
While we respect what the AWA pilots were there to accomplish, the US Airways MEC’s position remains the same and our MEC’s Steering Committee members did not compromise that position. We never wavered from our goal of protecting you from the Nicolau Award, and our threshold for meeting those goals never changed.
I’ll be calling the MEC into session for a special meeting next week. While there is no comprehensive counterproposal to bring back to the MEC, they'll receive a briefing on the process, and I plan to add two other items to the agenda: developing a distribution methodology for 2007 Profit Sharing and Stock Options and to review an agreement extending the timeframe for filing disputes concerning flow-through issues.
The MEC will now review our options. Keep in mind that the odds of any plan we develop succeeding are greatly diminished by members of this MEC continuing to cower behind their fear of failure and seeking to sabotage any process we elect to pursue. You can see that all of the noise and accusations coming out of PHL Council 41 about the work of our Steering Committee was unfounded and disingenuous. When it came time to meet directly with our AWA counterparts, we did exactly what we said we would, AAA pilots working with AWA pilots trying to mitigate the damages of the Nicolau Award.
Excuses and alibis will not replace leadership. We made a promise, and we kept it. There was no cramdown, no end-run deal, no deal chasing and no back room conspiracies. I hope you did not fall for these contrived ideas spread in order to try and scare you. The majority of this MEC and your MEC officers are not afraid of failure. We said we were going to look under every stone to find solutions and we meant it. My only fear is that some of our MEC fear the search may actually produce something that would require them to lead rather than criticize. I can tell you that the majority of your MEC was willing to continue the search. Although this process has not worked so far, we are no worse off for engaging in the exercise.
You would have been extremely proud of our team of pilots who met at the Wye River Conference Center. These are men of honor and integrity and they are most importantly, men of their word. Their commitment to the process and to you was rock solid. Threats and intimidation attempts by some minority disenchanted MEC members and paper tigers did not sway these men of honor from pursuing the direction that the majority of the MEC had set. They did their best trying to reach a solution to the Nicolau Award. At this time the AWA pilots are unwilling to address our seniority concerns. Again, we are no worse off for having engaged in this process. We remain right where we started and that is in separate operations with the West.
I thank you for your patience during the past few weeks. I know it’s been difficult. There will be other options at our disposal after the MEC gets the chance to strategize internally next week. While conditions and opportunities may change, the goal has not and our threshold for success has not. Our mission remains the same, to protect you from the damages caused by the Nicolau Award."
