I couldn't agree with you more. But I lay most of the blame on the ibt. It is two fold. First, if they had any respect for this profession, they would of never brought this garbage back for a vote. Second, they were selling this P.O.S. harder than the company was. Saying things like, the company will not give any more, it's only a two year contract, they will put us on the back burner if we turn this down, and the best is, this something to build on so we can get them next time. LOL, all quotes from the ibt.
Sadly I admit, I was hoping to ride on your coat-tails brother.
AA mechs have been industry leaders in concessions for decades and your agreement is better than the current agreement there and the TA that was rejected.
Go to www.union-reports.dol.gov and find out what the guys who sold this get paid. Look up the LM-2 filing. You may want to enquire what type of pass they get when they fly. While the RLA mandates free travel on the carrier for negotiations some airlines give top union officials positive space first class seats. Sometimes I think that Union leaders get too comfortable on their union paid salary & benifits and forget what it was like to live under a union negotiated concessionary contract. Its sad to see how successful the airlines have been at lowering our expectations and how little our Unions have done to raise them. How do they rationalize telling UPS that $46.99 is not enough for the A&Ps in EWR while telling A&Ps at CAL, on the other side of the same Airport, that $36.92 is good enough?
Its not unreasonable for workers who have consistantly increased productivity to see their standards of living at the very least "maintained".
Good luck and start building the strike fund for 2012. Since 2002 the FAA has only issued around 6000 new certificates per year, thats probably at the most 3000 new A&Ps a year. AA alone loses around 500'year through attrition. A&P demand is not confined to the airline industry and MROs are already reporting difficulty filling positions, and thats with 15 million people out of work!! AA just lowered the experience requirement for Line Maintenance to ZERO years experience, get your A&P and you can start fixing airplanes and working live trips tomorrow. The shortage is here, sure we may be in a better postion in 2012 but we will also have lost two more years of our lives working at substandard wages (your contract leaves you around $10/hr underpaid and the 2.5% increases will leave you lagging inflation( inflation averages 3% per year).
With the Republican sweep of Congress we can look forward to at least two things from our Government that would mitigate our ability to capitalize on the shortage.
1. Less oversight of Foreign Maintenance-more mechanics jobs shipped overseas
2. FAR 66 to resurface, this would let the airlines certify their own mechanics, so instead of us holding our portable FAA license airlines would issue their own, non-portable but equivelent certificates. It was shelved around 10 years ago but its not dead.
Republicans will cite the shortage itself as a reason for this, "These are jobs American dont want" they will claim. They will claim that if they dont change the system (more outsourcing and company issued certs) that our aviation infastructure will fail (just like they claim that if we didnt let illegals come in and harvest our food for slave wages we would starve), the fact is that its the wage that is causing the shortage not the work.
