.from what Todd wrote......the APA got themselves in this corner and this far in the mess with management. Of course, AMR isn't a lovely place to work, from many Ive heard from, but the problem is management vs APA; not take it out on the pax time.
From what Todd wrote? I respect Todd and value a lot of what he has to say. But when it comes to talking about other unions his posts have a taste of a rabid Steelers fan trashing a rival team.
Unless I'm missing something, AA management declared bankruptcy, offered the pilots a crap sandwich that other than hourly rates, are worse than most regionals. They said no, then management throws the entire contract out, and its the pilots fault? Its time that front line employees stop having to sacrifice to make up for bad management. What's the point of making sacrifices for your company, when it results in 11,000 job cuts? To sacrifice so you can still see silver planes flying around from the unemployment line? This isn't like patriotism where even though they're not paying you, you feel proud of your country. As soon as that paycheck stops coming, you'll probably regret the sacrifices you made to keep it ticking.
All that being said, I highly agree that its not right to take it out on passengers. This is my frustration with my management when they send us emails talking about how our on time performance and completion factor are somewhat lacking. To them on time performance are green or red numbers on a spreadsheet. To us they are standing there like an idiot in front of your passengers, who were going to job interviews, weddings, vacations planned for years, etc, because you have a maintenance problem that could have avoided with a little bit of foresight. I'm a big fan of fly it now, grieve it later, purely for the passengers sake.
Unfortunately there really aren't any ways you can stick it to management in this industry. Our job is to show up, ensure the airplane is safe to fly, then go fly it. Other than being where you need to be at the time you need to be there and doing your job the way you're supposed to, performance is very much out of our control as pilots. If the plane is broken, the plane is broken. If there's an ATC delay, there's not a damn thing you can do about that either. Job action is illegal unless approved by the government. Bankruptcy laws favor management 9 times out of 10.
So I guess my question is, what do you do? Your company you've been with for 20-30 years is mismanaged (or possibly uses creative accounting to make it appear so) they cut your pay and benefits drastically, and the job market sucks so you can't really take your ball and go home. What do you do?