QUESTION: The IBT has said, in a letter dated February 6, 2012, that “Under the Settlement Agreement that ended American Airlines’ concessionary negotiations with the TWU, American mechanics and related employees are to receive 4.8 percent of the total equity in American….that is allotted to a certain class of unsecured creditors.” They further state that “If the IBT replaces the TWU, the IBT will hold and distribute that equity stake….” Are the statements by IBT about the equity true?
ANSWER: the Statements by IBT about the equity allotted to TWU are wildly and irresponsibly inaccurate.
First, there is no agreement anywhere that would allot to Mechanic and Related as a class or craft 4.8% of the equity in American or in any successor company. The 4.8% equity is allotted by agreement to TWU as a fund from which TWU will distribute their appropriate shares to ALL SEVEN of the classes or crafts represented by TWU. Mechanic and Related, as a class or craft, will receive an appropriate share of this equity. The responsibility of determining what that appropriate share is, and must rest on TWU, since the equity agreement itself contains no formula as to how the equity is to be shared out among the seven classes or crafts. Thus, not only is IBT spectacularly wrong and inaccurate regarding the amount of equity to be distributed to the M&R class or craft; but its ignorance in that respect undermines its equally uninformed notion that there exists an already defined amount of equity that can and will be simply handed over to IBT if it displaces TWU as the M&R representative. There isn’t—as IBT could easily have found out for itself, if it had bothered to read the basic equity agreement.
Ask yourself: can you trust your vital job interests, in a dangerous time, to an organizational that plays so fast and loose with important facts? An organization that makes “guarantees” about an agreement that it obviously hasn’t bothered to even try to understand? Should you trust the task of administering complicated agreements regarding equity and other matters to the union that negotiated them? or to a union that seeks votes by making “guarantees” regarding an agreement that involves what may be hundreds of millions of dollars—but which can’t even be bothered to read?