I doubt AA had to pay much money upfront for the lease extension - unless DAL requires that rent be paid years and years in advance.
So if AA signs a lease for 17 years for say $10 million a year then they can add $170 million to their total debt and liabilities cant they?
So they dont have to pay much up front, dont have to pay interest on it because its not due yet but it gets added to the boogie-man factor of how much the company owes out. Back in 2003 we were given the figure of over $20 billion in Total Debt and Liabilities.
This is yet another example of the company hiding money and creating figures to make them look worse off than they are so the employees wont get a hold of it.
Total Debt = Short Term Debt +Long Term debt
Short term debt-any debt incurred by a company that is due within one year. The debt in this account is usually made up of short-term bank loans taken out by a company.
Long Term Debt-Loans and
obligations with a maturity of longer than one year; usually accompanied by interest payments. also called funded debt.
It's like when I borrowed $100k for a mortgage I owed the bank over $260,000. So I could then claim that I owed out $260,000 in Total debt to whoever was interested and still be considered truthful. I could later prepay the principle or renegotiate the interest rate and significantly lower my debt without lowering my assetts by the same amount. In other words I could eliminate $260,000 worth of Total Debt by simply paying out just $100,000, (and this is with an 8% rate).
This is one of the reasons why workers should ignore the figures the company gives out and simply focus on what we need to get paid. The numbers dont matter, they never did, because if they really did matter this industry would have dissappeared over 75 years ago.
How many times have we heard that this industry never made profits?
How many times have we seen figures that show the billions of dollars that the industry has "lost"?
I've been hearing this for the last 30 years.
Back when all them brand new Airbuss's rolled into the hangar the industry was operating at a loss. Back when AA starting accepting delivery of those brand new MD-80s the industry was operating at a loss. My guess is back when the company was accepting delivery of the brand new DC-3 the industry was operating at a loss.
Now we see 77 new 737s coming on line within the next two years and guess what? The industry is operating at a loss!!!!
Let them throw whatever figures they want out, ignore it, everybody else does. Airports are still raising their fees, oil companies took as much as they could. Suppliers are getting theirs. The executives still get theirs-they arent worried. The more we worry about their numbers the worse our individual numbers get. The more we give back the more everyone else gets to take. Even as "the pie" has gotten bigger our piece gets smaller! Wage expense is smaller now than its ever been.
According to all the experts this industry has never been profitable and it never will. Even if we paid to work here they would find a way to show a loss in order to try and get us to pay more for the privilidge of making them money.
Thats right, despite the fact that the airlines operate at a loss we are making huge amounts of money for others. $23.7 BILLION dollars last year went through AA. That $23.7 billion was generated through our labor. We generated more money and they laid out less than ever for our labor. $4000 landing fees. $100 departure taxes, $4.50 per Passenger fees, $1000 toilet seats, $750,000 tractors, billion dollar terminals, multimillion dollar aircraft and lets not forget what was it over $950million in interest payments directly from the airline?
Let somebody else subsidize the industry. Lets get our money for what we do.