Bubba, you are mistaken. The Merger Committee only had the authority to negotiate, it was never empowered to accept an Agreement, that authority rests with the MEC, just like during Contract Negotiations. You never give your negotiators the ability to accept the Agreement, that is standard, and I'm sure SWAPA's leadership also had the final authority as well.
It was up to the MEC to decide whether the Agreement brought back by the Merger Committee met the minimum standards, sending it out for Member Ratification, or to send them back to the table. If there was not a desire from the other party to continue negotiations, or if time ran out, it was to proceed to binding Arbitration, as agreed to under the Process Agreement.
Unfortunately, instead of proceeding under the Process Agreement, we got threatened with being parted out, and thus the underwhelming Agreement was overwhelmingly voted for.
Sorry Ty, perhaps I wasn't clear in what I was getting at in my post. I never meant to imply that the Merger Committee had the authority to send anything out for ratification. In all my references to the Process Agreement, I referred to AirTran ALPA's MEC's actions, not the Merger Committee. After all, it was the MEC (AirTran's direct representatives) who signed the thing.
In the beginning of the PA, immediately after recognizing that Allegheny-Mohawk allowed for binding arbitration, both unions (the leaderships, that is) agreed that they wanted to utilized negotiations instead of arbitration. Turns out that wasn't exactly true for the AirTran ALPA MEC, now was it? Their obvious (and even indirectly stated) gameplan was to go straight to arbitration. That doesn't sound like good faith to me.
The other thing that's mistaken about your post, is that nowhere in the PA does it allow for, if there "was not a desire from the other party to continue negotiations...," then they could "proceed to binding arbitration." The Process Agreement's ONLY mention of "desire," was the clearly stated, and agreed to by both unions, desire to avoid arbitration. And, of course, to bargain in good faith to achieve an agreement by negotiations. As I pointed out, AirTran ALPA's leadership had no intention of honoring their word in this case.
Bubba