From: Bill Hough -------------------- Airline Execs Fly High as Workers Nosedive -------------------- Marie Cocco April 24, 2003 Baggage handlers lose a few bucks for laundering their uniforms while the big shots squirrel away millions to save their own pensions if the company goes belly up. Average Joes give up vacation days to spare the plunging corporate craft while the CEO's family flies on a Valentine's Day junket to Mexico, bumping paying passengers whose fares keep the company aloft. The corporation is supposed to file tell-all documents about executive pay with regulators, but wins an extension on detailing new pay and perks so they're not revealed until after the suckers in the unions have voted to trim their own paychecks by as much as 23 percent. Management had insisted that giving back money that pays the mortgage was better for workers than throwing their jobs on the mercy of the bankruptcy court. No, this isn't the latest Michael Moore movie. It's a real-life drama for workers at American Airlines. The "stupid white man" who wrote the script is company chief Donald J. Carty. The guy deserves immediate induction to the Gordon Gekko Hall of Fame. To win the honor, executives must demonstrate an unerring ability to run companies into the ground - destroying the lives of the rank and file - while cushioning themselves and their fellow managers from the fall. Special consideration is given to nominees who are simultaneously petitioning Congress for a taxpayer bailout, using the heart-wrenching plight of the very employees they've duped to lobby lawmakers. The American Airlines story is an all-American story. Faced with mounting losses brought on by the sluggish economy, terrorist attack and war, Carty urged American's workers to accept $1.8 billion in givebacks. The alternative, he said, was bankruptcy - more job losses, pensions cut by as much as half (as they were in the recent US Airways bankruptcy), and so on. The workers voted to tighten their own belts, but not without difficulty - flight attendants kept balloting open an extra day. Meanwhile, Carty had a little secret. In what was supposed to have been a year-end filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company revealed after the vote closed that it planned bonuses for a handful of top executives, to reward them for staying on with American. Carty's own take would be $1.6 million. It also had poured $41 million of the cash-strapped airline's funds (mind you, it borrows to pay for fuel) into a special pension trust to supplement retirement benefits of top executives - and to be completely safe from creditors' clutches in bankruptcy. American's pension plan for employees just happens to be underfunded by $3.4 billion. The company has said cuts would be part of a bankruptcy reorganization. Since this excellent adventure came to light, Carty has apologized - but said he'd only made "communications mistakes." Translation: The whole thing's a public relations problem, not a moral mess. The bonuses have been canceled; the special trust for cushy executive retirements remains. Now unions for mechanics and flight attendants, citing the practice of holding an election while they were blissfully ignorant, plan re-votes. The pilots may never ratify results of the first. Here, then, is where the workers of American Airlines stand: They can take out their rage at the ballot box, turning down the givebacks and rejecting a vision of "shared sacrifice" that means sacrifice for workers and a bigger share for bosses. This would bring on bankruptcy. Or they can suck it up and cut their wages. A year and a half after Enron opened eyes to the plague of duplicity in the corporate suite, you can add more victims to the tally. Carty didn't break any laws, just the code of decency. The unwritten rules that once seemed to keep greed in check have been wiped off the books. Tale after tale of the corporate fleecing of average workers fades to black, lost in a bottomless political hole. Lawmakers cry foul before the cameras, but then fumble deliberately on the follow-through. Do not believe that this stuff just keeps happening. It happens because we're allowing it to. Copyright (c) 2003, Newsday, Inc. -------------------- This article originally appeared at: http://www.nynewsday.com/news/opinion/columnists/ny-vpcoc243251247apr24,0,2628439.column Visit Newsday online at http://www.newsday.com