"But Hewitt and other TWU representatives say the company also should focus on holding the line on management pay and benefits - and multi-billion aircraft acquisitions."
Agree on management pay and benefits however the aircraft acquisitions are done on money loaned from GECAS, manufacturer backed financing, and buy/sell/lease agreements. These new aircraft will drive down maintenance labor costs through the 6-7 year honeymoon period on heavy airframe overhaul. The new engines on the 737 and A320 aircraft stay on wing a long time. "Nearly 70 percent of all CFM56-7B engines delivered to date have yet to undergo a first shop visit, with the average initial time on wing of approximately 30,000 hours." (GE 2010). JT8D's suck gas and require overhaul three to four times as much. According to Boeing the 787 is a heavy line maintenance MH aircraft. That plane is not supposed to be in heavy check for 12 years after delivery. So all those "paid for" MD80s, 757s, and 767s that are deep in to their heavy cycles and sucking up a huge amount of overhaul labor will be replaced by lower labor cost aircraft.
Yes, Bob will say the "white space" was a lie but that is not entirely true. Deferred maintenance, cabin improvements, and winglets have added labor hours to the workload. You could call the winglets and cabin improvements "optional" but are they really? Winglets save fuel so deferring them would cut labor costs (layoff the +125 AMTs per line) but the savings would be eaten up by the increased fuel burn. Cabin mods could also be considered optional but a quick look around to the other guys (jetblue, virgin, and DL) their cabins are getting upgraded and that attracts customers and helps you maintain or even demand a higher premium per passenger.
Lack of business acumen is why we can't get a good contract with the current team of negotiators.
In June of 2009 there were so many white spaces by 2012 the company said that if they did not fill those White Spaces with 3p work that 1200 jobs would disappear. That night Don and his little team met in a separate room and came up with "an exercise" to "show the 6th floor we are serious about filling those white spaces" . The exercise included gutting our table position and giving the company nearly everything they wanted. This was done over the objection of several committee members. Nearly all those who drove the exercise are gone, at least those who face elections, those who opposed it are still there.
Three weeks later, despite the White spaces the company said that they would not extend the VBR to the line because they could not afford to lose them, they admitted that they lose around 400 to 500 mechanics a year, not including the projected closure of MCI which Don threw out there because he knew where I was going with the question. In other words normal attrition would have removed more heads than the projected white spaces. Granted there my have been, under the projection at least, some displacement to the line from the bases, but then again that was based on a projection that did not materialize.
Less than a year later the company requested that all the Presidents fly down to DFW where we met in a room in the Admiral Club. Not only were the white spaces all gone but they were booked past. 2015 and were falling behind on work. The meeting spent about 5 minutes on OH and the rest was on how they wanted to shift manpower around, focusing on the five hubs.
You go on to claim that delaying the mods would cost jobs, well how do you figure that when we are sending checks to TIMCO. I said delay those mods till they get caught up, so no jobs would be lost, in fact it provides more job security because it puts more work on the books further into the future, guess your " business acumen" missed that. In fact that was one of the proposals put forward in Tulsa.
Yes, if AA doesn't grow there will be a lag in demand for our labor as new airplanes come online. The first impact will be to OT that many have become accustomed to in order to make ends meet, people will continue to leave, more than likely offsetting any need to lay anyone off. The huge falloff in A&P school graduates will discourage AA from cutting people loose. So our numbers per ASM will continue to decrease over time, as they have for pretty much the entire history of this industry. Are you saying that we should all agree to work for less so AA can hire more people? Isn't that what antilabor people say? "Lower wages so employers can hire more workers". We are already working for about half in real terms what we worked for in early 2003, and that's without BK and we still lost more than a third of our headcount, nearly all of it through attrition at this point.
In six weeks we will be in 2012, instead of White Spaces and looming layoffs we have full docks, full OT and checks being farmed out due to lack of capacity. Instead of looking at an additional 1200 heads gone from OH we see they have hired several hundred. In just the last twelve months they have not only replaced those who have left during this time but increased headcount.
The mechanics they got in New York are not from the street, they are from other carriers, primarily AE and Delta. Jet blue upped their top pay to $40hr so they wont do too well recruiting from that LCC,or any other LCCs, which is where AA and most other carriers typically got their experienced mechanics. You say you are a mechanic in DFW, assuming that you work OT what is the DFW OT list up to currently?
My guess is that within a year of the contract being settled AA will lose around 15 to 20% of their A&P mechanics, not from a lack of work, but more from a lack of desire to work for AA anymore. This would more than offset job losses due to the honeymoon.
