I rember a slogan of a past poster that read "perception is reality!" unfortunately it is true with this situation.
Ownership should be the key word here. When you purchase a house, you claim ownership, but you dont really own the house until you pay the house off. You share your ownership with the bank and your equity stake grows longevity of payments! As pilots of AA, we dont own a lot of things we claim literally, but, one of the things we own lock stock and barrel is our senority list. AMR purchased TWA, and unfortunately they purchased the employees also, unfortunately because it has caused so much heartache. AMR paid cash for your senority list, read paid in full, and guess what, they gave it to the APA. Since APA owns the pilots lists at AA, we have the right of (now) ownership to the TWA list and thus the ability to do what we will with that list.
Our list is not completely paid for because we are still basically paying for our list with our own pilots longevity, but we do have lots of equity, in the form of 12000 pilots. After the purchase we now have 14000 including the furloughees. (give or take) So you see although yo contribute to our equity stake, your longevity was paid for with $760+ million dollars of which you only increase our BOTTOM line. At least you have a number and at least you do have the ability to return to a flying job without question when the industry recovers! If you want to jump ship, go right ahead because there are many regional pilots that would love to be in your place.