http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5016437
DELTA: Nothing less than the airline’s future is at stake right now. “Unless we get our costs down the future is bleak.”
ALPA PILOT: “We really believe in this airline. However, when you take a fifty percent pay cut and you lose your pension—totally—you have no alternative. We’re willing to work with them, but not under those conditions. In the history of Delta labor relations we’ve never had a strike, ever. We’ve always been able to work out a consensual agreement in good times and also in bad times. This is the first time where management has had to go to an outside entity, in this case the bankruptcy judge, to try to reject the contract we’ve worked under for excess of fifty years.”
ALPA LAWYER: There has been an irreparable breach of trust between the pilots and Delta’s management. “Let us now mourn Delta’s culture—it is no more.”
JUDGE: While she refused to resign, she reserved some of her most caustic remarks for the management: “The company is throwing darts at the pilots because they are smaller than you and you can stomp on them.”
DELTA: “I understand resistance but I suggest in this case it is somewhat misguided resistance. They should look at what has happened at Northwest and look at what has happened at US Air and, god forbid they should look what’s happened to Pan Am and TWA. This is not a bargaining game.”
NARRATOR: The hearing is expected to last for several days.
FADE MUSIC: “Flight of Bumblebee.”
DELTA: Nothing less than the airline’s future is at stake right now. “Unless we get our costs down the future is bleak.”
ALPA PILOT: “We really believe in this airline. However, when you take a fifty percent pay cut and you lose your pension—totally—you have no alternative. We’re willing to work with them, but not under those conditions. In the history of Delta labor relations we’ve never had a strike, ever. We’ve always been able to work out a consensual agreement in good times and also in bad times. This is the first time where management has had to go to an outside entity, in this case the bankruptcy judge, to try to reject the contract we’ve worked under for excess of fifty years.”
ALPA LAWYER: There has been an irreparable breach of trust between the pilots and Delta’s management. “Let us now mourn Delta’s culture—it is no more.”
JUDGE: While she refused to resign, she reserved some of her most caustic remarks for the management: “The company is throwing darts at the pilots because they are smaller than you and you can stomp on them.”
DELTA: “I understand resistance but I suggest in this case it is somewhat misguided resistance. They should look at what has happened at Northwest and look at what has happened at US Air and, god forbid they should look what’s happened to Pan Am and TWA. This is not a bargaining game.”
NARRATOR: The hearing is expected to last for several days.
FADE MUSIC: “Flight of Bumblebee.”
Last edited:
