American Airlines Still Not Making Progress With Their Unions

As reported in this article, American Airlines doesn’t seem to be making progress with it’s unions, despite being in bankruptcy.

In part, AMR (American Airlines’ parent company) said, “More than a month has passed since we outlined our business plan and asked our unions to roll up their sleeves and work with us to tackle our collective challenges. As reflected in this week’s monthly operating report, we continue to lose money as our cost structure is too high and uncompetitive with our industry peers. We cannot sustain this path.”

AA has been negotiating with their unions for years, to no avail. And, while I have my own strong opinions about unions, I’ll leave those out of this for the time being.

The one thing that does really surprise me here is that the unions aren’t doing more to try and continue discussions now that AA is heading down the bankruptcy path.  Every other airline that went down this path ended up cutting a wide swath through their union staff.  Even if the two sides were far apart, you would think the union would want to spend as much time at the bargaining table to get something done.