The reserve system was also not improved. Creating a financial incentive to not schedule as many crew members to work reserve by making American pay a premium wage for these shifts would allow more workers to keep their precious days off instead of picking up required trips.
The TA would limit the ability of flight attendants to transfer work locations since it allows for out-of-base flight attendants to pick up trips and thus reduces the incentive for the company to allow transfers to understaffed bases since they would now have a “systemwide open time pool.”
Significantly, the contract does not include a return to pre-pandemic staffing levels for long-haul widebody aircraft. American Airlines continues on with reduced staffing, which started early in the pandemic when passenger numbers plummeted, despite those numbers having since returned to pre-pandemic numbers.
Last fall, American Airlines flight attendants voted to authorize a strike by a vote of 99.47 percent after having been kept on the job with no raises since January 1, 2020. The company justified this under the pretext of hardship from the pandemic, and the APFA bureaucracy did nothing to challenge it. In the meantime, flight attendants faced insulting and dangerous working conditions, including deaths and mass infection from COVID-19 and poisoning by toxic uniforms.
The APFA bureaucracy used the provisions of the anti-worker Railway Labor Act (RLA), as they did with flight attendants at Southwest and United, to deny American Airlines workers their right to strike and tie them up in an unending cycle of pro-company mediation that can end in Congress and the White House imposing a previously-rejected contract on workers, as they did with railroad workers at the end of 2022.
Both American Airlines and APFA were aware that the union bureaucracy was not going to allow a strike to go forward under conditions of the US presidential elections. Not only will APFA not allow a strike to damage Harris’s chances at being elected President, but the union will also not allow a strike to damage the ruling class’s war plans.
Indeed, the Biden administration intervened in the American Airlines contract, working with the union bureaucracy to ensure a settlement was reached before a walkout took place. Biden hailed the announcement of the deal, stating, “I thank Acting Secretary Su, Secretary Buttigieg, and other members of my Administration for their efforts to help both sides secure this agreement, which averts a strike that would have been devastating for the industry and consumers.”
The union apparatus claimed it did not want to risk the interference of the National Mediation Board (NMB) if Trump were to once again gain office and appoint his own people to the NMB. But both capitalist parties have demonstrated that they are united in their determination to suppress and exploit the working class. Biden and Harris have already shown their commitment to use the reactionary RLA to deprive workers of their democratic rights and impose management’s terms.
This conspiracy between the union bureaucracy and the political establishment must be opposed by workers if they are to win their demands.
Workers should campaign for the rejection of the tentative agreement at American Airlines by the largest possible margin. To prepare a struggle against both American Airlines and the APFA apparatus, workers should organize rank-and-file committees, which will provide the means to link up across companies and work sectors in a fight for workers’ common interests.
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Publish date : 2024-08-26 16:19:00
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