American Airlines has pursued a strategy of semi-engagement and delay with most of their employee union groups for several years now.  It wasn’t a completely ineffective strategy for the past few years in that salaries remained the same and with the current economic climate most employee groups haven’t been in the mood to push things.

The problem is, most of those employee groups gave up significant wages to prevent a bankruptcy filing and are now approaching 8 years without a raise.  Now the Flight Attendant’s union and the TWU (representing several groups such as mechanics and bag handlers) are pretty much at the end of their patience.  While the economy hasn’t recovered, nor has the employee’s quality of life.  If anything, I would suspect most employees’ have suffered significant degradation of their quality of life.  Particularly in the past 2 years.

Accordingly, these employees groups have reached a point where there is little to lose from strike.  To the outsider looking in, it would appear that they have their jobs to lose (via bankruptcy and downsizing) but that isn’t necessarily true.  While AA has suffered large losses over the past 2 years, it also holds a great deal of cash.  Those employees are looking at that cash.  What’s more, to expect employees to simply sit without a new contract and, more importantly, some certainty for the future is rather naive at this point.

Both the flight attendants and the TWU have asked that they be released from negotations soon and be allowed to start the first steps towards a strike.  Unfortunately for AA, they’ve got a bit of a good argument for this now.  TWU employees have been negotating since 200 5/2006.  Flight attendants just a tad shorter than that.  It paints the picture that none of these negotiations are going anywhere and the common party to all is AA’s management.  At some point, they will be released from these negotiations to start a 30 day cooling off period.

What’s worse is that AA is faced, potentially, with three very strident labor groups asking for release all about the same time and, at this point, with some justification.  It puts them in a bad position to negotiate with any one group and in a position to not be able to operate at all if any of these groups cooperate with each other.  Ordinarily, I wouldn’t expect them to but this time . . . maybe.

Both airlines and unions need a better way to negotiate.  It is unfair to the employee groups to be stuck in negotiations for more than 1 to 2 years.  It’s bad for the airline to have incentive to maintain the status quo by delaying and it’s bad for parties’ morale.

Filed under: Airline News by ajax