My Comments on Reddings letter;

To my colleagues:

As we continue contract talks with the TWU, I want to re-emphasize our commitment to bargaining in good faith and to reaching agreement on contracts for each of our represented workgroups.

The company has not moved off their “cost neutral” contract. All the gains from “working together” and other productivity gains that the TWU gave since the massive concessions of 2003 add up to ZERO credit for us. Add “Shared Gain” to the list of broken promises that AA has made to their employees.

This is a difficult task.

Only because they choose to make it that way. In 2003 they hammered out a deal in less than six weeks.

Rarely have we faced as many challenges, from fierce competition and high fuel prices to survival in an industry that has lost $30 billion in a single decade.

Not so challenging that Mr. Redding is willing to put aside his bonuses as he asks us to continue to sacrifice though.

But we’ve got a strong will at AA, and I have a lot of faith in this company and our people to meet the challenges head on.

It’s going to take some more hard work to get where we need to be in terms of reaching a deal.

There you have it, work hard and show him how you feel about their version of a deal.

From the company’s perspective, we are working to consider the issues that are important to you, our employees, while keeping in mind our responsibility to approach this process with a focus on what is in the long-term best interest of American, its stakeholders and all of its employees.

They could care less about what’s important to us. Look at what they threw out there after two years of no-gotiations and you can see that clearly. They offered to get rid of the two half pay sick days because their outlays for sick pay in M&R reportedly went up by 300% since they instituted this punitive policy. The offer of one more week of vacation for employees with less than 5 years “only” is especially self serving since only an extremely small amount of people would be affected and they would have a hard time hiring anybody if they didn’t. I don’t recall anybody thinking that its important that we go six years with no incremental raises, send work to China and other foreign countries or agree to get rid of half of the mechanics and replace them with unlicensed mechanics.

That means that, as we consider these contracts, we’re looking at several factors that affect the company and our ability to compete, the only way we will succeed in the long term. These include:

§ The U.S. airline industry’s projected costs and revenues

§ How to improve AA’s productivity

§ Meeting the needs of our fleet and operations

§ Our ability to provide enhanced contracts for our people balanced against the competitive disadvantage of wage and benefit costs that already are the highest in the industry

Here is where we can really see that Mr.Redding is full of shyte. I’m so tired of hearing this same discredited claim over and over again about AAs labor costs. When we compare labor rates AA is not the highest. In fact when it comes to AMTs we are one of the lowest. Number eight out of the top ten according to the company’s incomplete list on its own contract negotiations website(they conveniently leave UPS and FedEx off the list but UPS and FedEx include AA when they talk to their mechanics). Our DB pension costs are around 2%(according to the company’s total value statement) of our base wage while SWA contributes 8% of gross wages. Our labor unit costs per ASM are higher because we do more in house which actually makes our total ASM costs competitive. The company admitted as much a few months back in a presentation to the Presidents council at corporate headquarters. You also have to remember that all the contract work we do also drives up our labor costs but does not produce any ASMs, another factor that distorts our labor costs. Ironically not only are they not giving us any credit for the hundreds of millions of extra revenue that work brought in but they are trying to use the labor costs that generate that extra revenue against us!

We’re in a different stage of mediated negotiations with each workgroup and continue to make progress.

In the year that I’ve been in negotiations I’ve not seen any progress, in fact the company keeps increasing their demands and offering less. They are moving further away from a settlement. Why wouldn’t they? They are getting what they want. They obviously don’t care how long it takes to get a new agreement, believe their actions, not their words.

In each case, I believe that the company and the union can find common ground. But to do so, we must all recognize that both parties need to consider the real constraints we face today in order to create opportunities for tomorrow by positioning this airline to be a stronger competitor.

Mr Reddings version of common ground is “you get nothing so I can get bonuses”. “You accept being the lowest paid and contractually commit to making AA the “Best in class”. In August of 2009 Mary Tinsman summed it up when she said “I jut want to make sure that everything we wanted is incorporated into the language”.

In coming weeks, we’ll be providing you a lot of information about our vision for the company under FlightPlan 2020, our position in the industry, our contract proposals, and our view on how we can strengthen and improve our M&E and Airport Services operations for the good of all TWU-represented employees.

If the plan doesn’t include industry leading pay then I really have no interest in it. I’m tired of being told that poverty is good for me by people who make millions of dollars a year working for the same company.

Please take the time to review a variety of the information that’s out there – from industry news to the TWU’s communications to competitive data and the company’s materials -- so that you understand the current environment as it relates to the issues at play in these negotiations and what’s most important to you.

Yes review the information but keep in mind the long history we have with this company and their broken promises and manipulation of “information”, how in 1995 they withheld information that made the “me too” clause useless and we sat out the greatest economic expansion in history under a 6 year 6.5% contract, how in 2003 they broke our contract under the threat of bankruptcy and the promise of shared sacrifice while they hid the fact they stashed away millions for the executives. If you don’t learn from history you will repeat it. Have you learned anything yet?

And as always, thanks for your hard work and professionalism on the frontlines and for your commitment to safety, quality, efficiency, and excellent customer service. That focus is the most important factor to our future success.

“Thanks for your hard work and professionalism”, just don’t expect to paid like a hard working professional.  So far the company’s strategy hasn’t been successful for us, our real wage has declined by roughly 40%, the company wants to push it down another 12%, we work more and earn less than ever before. I’m sure that Mr Redding’s version of success as it applies to Mr Redding is very different than what he feels applies to us.

I say focus as much as possible on what we need to do to get management to treat us fairly.  A prosperous AA does not automatically equate to prosperity for us, we saw that from 1995 to 2001, especially when their strategy for prosperity is paying us less. If they want us to “buy in” to Flight Plan 2020 the fare is “Industry Leading”, otherwise we’re not interested.  I’m all for making AA “Best in Class” and I would be willing to commit to achieving that, as soon as they make us “Industry Leading” in pay and benefits, its called quid-pro-quo.  If they are determined to send us to the bottom then I’m sure we can do the same for the company.

Bob Owens