5.14.03

This is APFA President John Ward with the APFA Hotline for Wednesday, May 14.

The APFA and the Company met today to discuss the results of the Overage Leave of Absence and Partnership Flying proffer that closed on Monday. The projected flight attendant overage for July, 2003 of 4,986 has been reduced to 3,123. What that means is that 1,863 flight attendants who received furlough letters will no longer be subject to furlough. And that’s at least a little bit of good news at a time when we could certainly use some. Of course the bad news is that there will be an additional 3,000 plus flight attendants furloughed, bringing to over 6,000 the total number of flight attendants furloughed since the fall of 2001. The senior most flight attendant to be furloughed, effective July 1 has an occupational seniority date of April 6, 2000 and a system seniority number of 20,308.

With these furloughs comes the additional disruption of having to force-transfer some number of flight attendants to the STL base due to the huge impact these furloughs will have on the STL base. At the present time, approximately 300 flight attendants have valid transfer requests on file to STL. The 600 additional flight attendants needed in STL will come from the junior flight attendants at those bases where an overage still exists. At this time, the Company has indicated that those overages are expected to be in MIA, DFW, LAX and to a lesser extent, in SFO and DCA. We won’t know until late tomorrow, Thursday, May 15, who will be assigned to STL , as the Company has indicated that the STL transfers will continue to be processed until that time. I know that these latest furloughs and the resulting involuntary assignments to STL are simply the latest blow in what has been a horrible couple of years for the American Airlines flight attendants and the APFA. These are troubled times, to be sure. Between these latest furlough numbers and the anxiety over the recent changes to the agreement, the morale is, as would be expected, pretty awful. And the rumor mill, always active, is running at a pace far greater than I or the APFA Communications Department or the APFA web master can keep up with. And this negativity and misinformation are starting to take a toll on the organization. And I’m going to do my best to try to turn that around. If allowed to continue unchecked, we’re all going to suffer in the long run.

Although my crisis management skills have certainly been put to the test since I was elected APFA president three years ago, one of the things that, unfortunately, I’ve not been able to do enough of while managing these things, is to be out there with the membership. And, although things show no sign of slowing down any time soon, I’m going to be heading out next month to each of the flight attendant bases to hear directly from you your concerns and suggestions as we move forward. Once the schedule has been finalized, it will be posted on the APFA web site and announced on this hotline.

That’s it for this edition of the APFA hotline. Thank you for calling. As I mentioned, this hotline will be updated tomorrow evening, Thursday, May 15.

Hello. This is Liz Geiss, DFW InfoRep Captain, with a hotline update for Wednesday, May 14th, 2003.

APFA Officials will be meeting with the company today at 1:00p.m. CDT to receive the results of the Overage Leave Proffer, Partnership Flying Proffer, and the final number of furloughs expected, after all information is processed.

We will be updating the hotline and the web site late this afternoon once we have received this information.

Thank you for calling.