LBMF: low salaries at Continental Airlines, People's Express and New York Air, merged into CO, were no cure for a tortured product which never recovered from "Frankie (Lorenzo) Smooth Talk" and his short-term goals for personal enrichment. Years ago at TWA, the pilots all ended up with a 40% pay cut, which lasted years-how would this have affected (FAE etc) computations during the last few years for your retirment pay after thirty years? Most of this was in order to support their airline, just to compensate for Carl Icahn's gouging of critical operating cash.
This does not include using his attorneys for a key goal: to steal part of the employees' pension funds. Icahn's demanded to exchange his ownership for a significant portion of TWA's wholesale ticket stock [=cashflow], with all profits into Icahn's (group's) pockets: NONE of those ticket profits went to the airline.
This doesn't begin to describe employee givebacks at numerous other airlines, nor Lorenzo's crippling of numerous airlines: whether he was majority owner or not is no justification for such bloodthirsty greed.
Are US pilots on this website really so ignorant of US airline events since deregulation, or just pretending not to be aware of news in "Aviation Week", etc? Neither the "Wall Street Journal", "Business Week", or "Fortune" magazine can pretend not to be anti-labor in their articles. I still am amazed at the Republican party's collaboration which put no limits on big business' access to retirment funds, which allowed so much airline butchery to take place, and likely with the help of many so-called "Southern Democrats".
Airline history can't be re-written (as with computers) while it is still stored on printed paper.
As for the UAL IAM: I doubt that the members really want a strike, which would now be very foolish.
[ 18 February 2002: Message edited by: Ignition Override ]</p>