Thanks for the questions. After the merger on 10 Apr. 2001, we remained at the TWA rates of pay, $18.25 per hour, base, with $.50 per license, so $19.25 for A&P.
Ten months later, on 2 Jan. 2002, we went on the AA payroll at $27+ per hour. The April 2003 contract brought up the pay to $31, for about five months, then a threatened bankruptcy caused the Transp. Workers Union to accept a rollback to $26, a $5.00 rollback for five years. The result was still a gain for us at TWA, but the rest of the AA workforce hate-mailed us saying that we were the reason the company was in trouble and that we had cost the rest of the guys all of their pay and bonuses since the merger. That was man-to-man, not a union thing. As to the pilot merger, that was explained in the Arbitrators letter, the Decision and Award, for the pilot group. Mr. Kasher said/wrote that he was guided by the precedent of mergers where the carriers were equal in workforce and the merger of carriers where the workforce sizes were ten-to-one. Thus he chose the TWA / AA ratio of 1 to 5 and that was based on the 24,700 TWA and 108,000 AA populations or the applicable pilot-only population to pilot only population method, they result in the same outcome.
If you will permit me a liberty to add: Several posts are rife with Union vs. Union and some clarity is in order. In any merger one party is the acquired and one is the acquirer, even in a meeting of equals. If it is not spelled out clearly in the public press, there will be a financial transaction; money, shares of stock, promissary notes, subordinated debentures, letters of intent, all of which set forth the matter of who will be acquiring whom. Allow that two strong unions are trying to get the best terms for the group whos dues they accept. There comes a point in the acquisition that the operation of law will reach a point of determining that the merged carriers are now operating as a "single carrier". Single carrier is a practical definition and not a comprehensive one, it looks for: common livery, uniforms, schedules, routes and gates, ticketing arrangements, domicile cities, and the broad general perception by the public that the two carriers are now one. The single-carrier threshold is the point at which one of the unions is tossed off the property as being redundant and no longer a proper representative, by action of law. Long way to say that one union may be loved, and still be disqualified to negotiate on behalf of the members whose dues they have in their wallets. Not lazy, not self-serving, not being paid off, not incapable of mounting a good legal challenge, just set aside by the determination of "single carrier". I watched the IAM get handcuffed as our union, and I wouldn't rest until I knew what caused it, I would not accept nonsensical talk from our committee, so I went on a search of the National Mediation Board website to see what darkness they could shed on things. Not much, at their site: http://www.nmb.gov/arbitration/amenu.html They are facilitators and recorders, and they maintain the list of qualified arbitrators that the parties must choose from. The Arbitrators DO NOT WORK for the government, they are paid by the parties over whom they preside during the dispute. They are mostly retired judges and attorneys who have experience in labor law. The NLRB is the real power over the process, they are at: http://www.nlrb.gov/ The caveat is this: Once the parties decide on binding arbitration -- no judge will ever review or retry any of the facts of the dispute in any venue. Even official misconduct by the Arb. is off-limits, unless substantiated to a grand jury of a Federal District Court, then it only has the ability to disqualify the arbitrator from future work, and cannot overrule his past decisions. We had Richard R. Kasher of Longboat Key, Florida. He violated his own writings, and when challenged during a dispute resolution hearing, he said, "I could not have anticipated every possible outcome when I wrote my original decision and award, over six years ago." What he wrote was the simple and common standard of all appended rulings: "The outcome of any dispute resolution hearing shall become part of the original award, and shall have the same power and effect as the original award." He was refusing to abide those words, because a convoy-of-complaints was being placed on his desk, after he granted one employee permission to move to DTW. Others wanted the same rules to apply, and he refused, thus recanting his own writings. My working friends are second-class citizens, with their own seniority rosters, unmerged, and let me pose the question that I posed in our open discussions: If I should reach my 50th year in aviation maintenance, and am about to walk to the podium to accept the Charles Taylor Award, will some AA mechanic in the audience yell out, "sit down rookie, you only have nine years seniority!" The answer was... Yes, that might very well happen. Walt in K.C.
