You're F*ing kidding me, right?
AGVMIA said:
Arpey deserves that and much more. CAL and AMR are the only 2 carriers to avoid bankruptcy (AMR has never filed), and even without the SIGNIFICANT advantages that other legacy carriers have, they still managed to turn things around. They saved your pensions, only took a 23% pay cut and you cry babies are still whining. Unbelievable!!! Now he gets rewarded for turning things around and still makes WELL BELOW what any fortune 500 company CEO makes. First quarterly profit in 5 years, and the pilots are already seeking blood. What makes you think AMR can sustain profitability even with all the right strategies implemented by management?
You can have 100% load factors (if they were feasible) and still lose money at $85+ a barrel of oil. The prudent thing is to use the earnings (cash) to pay down debt as fast as possible as to reduce lease/ mortgage expenses to prepare for oil at $100 barrel, which is coming. While most legacy carriers wiped BILLIONS of thier balance sheet, AMR still has $12 BILLION+ in long term debt that requires massive amount of interest.
I'm not saying professional pilots should not get paid professional wages, but think about this. The only way for AMR to get concessions was to THREATEN bankrupcty in 2003, which meant you were probably going to get pennies on the dollar for your pensions, not to mention possible steeper pay cuts.
EVERYTHING IN LIFE IS DRIVEN BY TWO SIMPLE WORDS: FEAR AND GREED!!!!!!
Nobody is seeking blood because we made a quarterly profit, we're p*ssed off because after the EMPLOYEES of this airline gave Billions of dollars to insure our collective survival, our MANAGEMENT is rewarding itself with large salary increases and UNBELIEVABLE bonuses... All the while talking about the NEED for FURTHER SACRIFICE!
You make it sound like 23% is nothing. It may not be as much as some other pilots had to endure, but then again, our bottom line wasn't in nearly as bad a shape as those at some other carriers. We were also the first airline who took those large paycuts OUTSIDE OF BANKRUPTCY! Meaning, we saw the writing on the wall and took the cuts to keep our company out of bankruptcy. Management didn't keep us out of chapter 13, WE DID! The same with our pensions, we sacrificed other things to hold onto those pensions as long as we have. It wasn't Gerard Arpey or any of his ilk who did it, it was the sacrifices of the EMPLOYEES of American Airlines that did it. Even so, I think the pensions in their current form at AMR will be history soon enough.
Regarding your statement about the long-term debt at AMR, your number is optimistically low, it's closer to 20+ billion. I couldn't agree more about your observation to pay that debt down. And if you'll re-read my post, you'll see that I wasn't calling for pilots to get more money, I was commenting on the absolute lunacy of our management team raiding the first profits this company has seen nearly six years to give themselves hefty raises and bonuses... I don't mind being paid dogsh*t wages as long as my sacrifices are being used to help this company survive, not so Gerard can go out and buy himself something shiny.
As far as your comments about the strategies implemented by management, did you know that nearly ALL of those strategies were the ideas of the common line employees of this airline? That's right, management sits back and implements the ideas of the average joe-blow toilet scrubber, and you give them credit for it...
Getting to the brink of bankruptcy was the fault of a management team that thought it was good idea to take seats off of airplanes, buy an airline whose assets didn't fit with AMR's, and among numerous other things, start fare wars with "value pricing" that cut deeply into our revenue stream...
Staying out of bankruptcy was the result of the sacrifices of the employees of American Airlines. If we go into bankruptcy at some point in the future, it will not be because I make too much money, it will be because of an environment where fuel is too expensive, and we don't charge enough to cover the cost of the product...
Everything in life is driven by two simple things: ACTION AND REACTION! Or, People who drink the kool-aid and People who don't! I don't...
