Alex Burgnon

Mr. Sanati:

Your inaccurate assessment of each of AA’s union’s motivation to support a merger between American and US Airways could not be further from the truth. Did you actually speak to any representative of either APFA, APA or TWU before writing this article? It would appear not.

Had you done so, you would have been told the actual truth of the matter, which is that virtually NONE of the nearly 50,000 unionized employees on AMR’s property has any confidence in Tom Horton and his team to turn American Airlines into a carrier with the scope and innovation necessary to compete with Delta and the newly-merged United. Their half-baked business plan consists of nothing more than the same failed strategies that got American into it’s current mess — all financed by and utterly dependent upon cuts in labor contracts which bring American’s total labor costs far below market rates. Needless to say, this is unacceptable to employees, like myself, whose careers at American have spanned much of their lives, and over the years have taken great pride in working for a once-great airline that, during the last decade, has been managed into the ground by a team that is unwilling to take any responsibility for their decisions and instead blame labor for American’s problems.

What Doug Parker and his proposed merger with US Airways can offer American instead is a chance to acquire the market share and increased revenue to compete with Delta and United IMMEDIATELY, rather than wait several years for this magical 20% increase in capacity to develop in the five limited "Cornerstone" markets AA management seems obsessed with tinkering over — a track that has failed and only exacerbated AA’s slide into Chapter 11 in the mind of many analysts.

The US Airways business plan, on the other hand, is superior to AA’s plan in every way. It offers both customers and employees at AA and US Airways the greatest opportunities over both the short and long term. Most important, Mr. Parker seems to understand the baseline economic (not to mention moral) value of a front-line workforce who is being treated fairly by being compensated with market-based wages. American’s stand-alone plan uses the bankruptcy process to abrogate union contracts and further alienate and disgust an already downtrodden workforce who see no hope for the future and have no confidence in their management. It benefits only Tom Horton and his dozens of VPs, who are the only ones who stand to gain anything from an independently reorganized American, in the form of millions of dollars of shares in their version of the newly-formed company, which neither I nor any of my esteemed and hard-working AA peers are in any way willing to stand for.

We are trying to save the airline we love, an airline that is very much a part of who we are. And as far we we are concerned, a merge with US Airways is the only way left to do it. We are not interested in extracting better terms from current AMR management at this point. We want them gone. Any other speculation such as yours is, with all due respect, utter nonsense.

Alex Burgnon
Flight Attendant
26 years