Several years ago, I sat down with an upper level AMR manager that I know socially and showed him where they could offer a retirement package of $10,000 cash plus half of accrued sick leave, and could pay for all of it in less than 2 years with the pay savings from hiring newbies. His response was "We don't have the money to do something like that." Two months later the executives collected that $9 million bonus on the same day we were reporting a $324 million loss for the 1st quarter of that year. Go figure.
I know it helps make your case, but AMR's employees and their unions just lose so much credibility when they continually restate this false stuff again and again. Why do the unions insist on continue to mix what would be cash payments for employee buyouts - or for whatever else the unions think AMR should have been spending their scant cash on in the last few years - with the entirely non-cash stock options? For the millionth time, most if not all of the "bonus" that went to executives was in the form of stock options - not cash. (You know - the stock options your union not only agreed to, but actively encouraged. But that's another story.)
Just like the stock options you and every other full-time U.S. employee got, those executive stock options had an effective "cost" to the company - cash or otherwise - of zero. And, incidentally, much of those stock options now also have a value to their holders of zero as well. Those stock options were not competing with any other investments, projects, buyouts or anything else AMR could have spent money on - because AA didn't "spend" any money on those stock options!
Thus, your upper level AMR manager acquaintance was right: AMR has not - for some time - had the available
cash to pay for early out packages, because AMR has had to be so ultra-conservative with their cash deployment. Every bit of cash AMR's operations have been generating for much of the last decade has been going pretty much entirely to one of three places: paying debt, contributing to the pensions, or buying new 737s.
However, I agree with you 100% that they should definitely do some form of buyout, or maybe a 5+5 like they did several times in the 90s. Today, AMR is using the bankruptcy process to restructure and shield themselves from obligations, just as their competitors did years ago, and this is freeing up cash, just like it did for their competitors years ago. A very smart way to deploy some of that cash - in addition to the new fleet, cabin upgrades, etc. - would be to buy out as many of the senior, topped-out employees as possible. As you say - it would require a cash outlay upfront, but would likely pay for itself in very short order.
But, having said all that, I have asked this question to the FAs I know, and I have gotten a different answer from each one: how attractive would they have to make the deal in order to get a lot of takers?