An American Airlines spokesperson announced the carrier has reached a tentative agreement with the TWU Mechanic & Related and Stores work groups.
American announced it would resume negotiations with flight attendants and mechanics this week. The pilots union reached an agreement with AA that has a 17% cost reduction instead of 20%. Both the flight attendants and mechanics unions then had the right to negotiate for a similar offer.
Reaction to the tentative agreement among local union members has varied.
"It's definitely a better offer, but we are still losing so much," Tony Bunch said.
Bunch is a mechanic, TWU Local 514 executive board member and a single dad. He said the cuts in the new tentative agreement will hurt.
"Our pensions, our retiree medical, our insurance is going up, work rule changes," Bunch said.
If approved, the new agreement would still cut roughly 1,300 jobs from the Tulsa area, but it would allow older employees who are eligible to take an "early out" with severance pay. Bunch saw that as a positive thing because it would lower the number of workers who would simply be cut loose.
Still, the loss of 1,300 jobs from the area would pull roughly $80 million in wages out of the local economy. A ripple effect of indirect losses from the economy would follow.
"It's going to affect the ma and pa businesses, the privately owned businesses," Bunch said. "Absolutely, it's going to affect them."
But John Hewitt, Maintenance Chairman for the TWU Local 514 and one of the men who sat at the negotiating table with American Airlines, said the new tentative agreement has a lot of upside and improvement, too.
"[It includes] a date of signing raise, where in the Last Best Offer that was not there," Hewitt said. "There's larger percentage raises."
Bunch said those raises aren't as much about union members being greedy as some people have accused them of being.
"Those wages are just money to back up what you're losing," he said. "And it does make a difference. It does make a difference, but it's not like go buy a new car money."
Hewitt said the raises will, however, help offset some of the economic loss to the area from the job cuts.
"Whether one cancels the other out, we'll have to wait and see," he said.
While the new tentative agreement is not perfect, or even good according to some union members, when push comes to shove it's a step in the right direction.
"It's better than what was on the table last time," Hewitt said.
"The membership will decide on whether this is good enough or not," Bunch said.
American is Tulsa's largest private employer, with more than 6,000 workers. The TWU has yet to set a date for members to vote on the new tentative agreement, but it's expected to happen within the next month.
AA spokesperson Bruce Hicks released this statement about the agreement:
“American Airlines is very pleased to have reached agreements on proposed contracts with the TWU Mechanic & Related and Stores workgroups. We reached agreements that address the needs of our people and still allow us to achieve the cost savings necessary for our company to compete and succeed.
As with APA, we were able to reduce the amount of targeted cost savings for these two TWU workgroups, in this case by about $35 million annually. Through this reduction, and a reallocation of profit sharing, we were able to provide additional pay raises, an adjustment to industry pay rates after three years, and changes in active medical benefits.
If ratified, these agreements would allow us to create a successful future for tens of thousands of American Airlines employees as we move through restructuring and beyond. The TWU tentative agreements, along with our tentative agreement with the APA, demonstrate that we can work creatively to reach a resolution that puts our company in a position to move forward quickly and successfully. We are pleased the Mechanic & Related and Stores TWU members will have the opportunity to review and vote on these tentative agreements.”
TWU posted this statement on its website:
“Our strategy to keep all of our options open and fight for fairness for all of our members is working,” said TWU International President James C. Little. “These two new agreements represent an improvement from the company’s previous offers and its motion to void our contracts pending before U.S. Bankruptcy Court. We will now present these tentative agreements to our membership for their final decision.”
“We made the case very aggressively to the company, and now we have tentative agreements for review and action by our members. These are still concessionary and painful deals, but we continue to fight in real ways to lessen the impact of these changes on our members and their families.”
American, which has about 73,000 employees, filed for bankruptcy protection in November and announced a plan in February to eliminate 13,000 union jobs as part of a cost-cutting move.
American is Tulsa's largest private employer, with more than 6,000 workers. The TWU has yet to set a date for members to vote on the new tentative agreement, but it's expected to happen within the next month.
