Reflecting on Labor Day

We celebrate Labor Day each year to honor the efforts of our nation’s workers. The three-day holiday weekend traditionally marks the end of summer, it’s one of the year’s busiest travel periods, and it’s an opportunity to get together with family and friends if you’re fortunate enough to have the time off.

It also provides an opportunity to reflect on the labor movement itself. One of the foundational elements of organized labor has always been the emphasis on building membership unity. The familiar adage “united we stand, divided we fall” neatly sums up the task unions face – unifying members to achieve their aims.

As we approached the end game in Section 6 negotiations last year, the APA membership voted overwhelmingly in favor of authorizing a strike if we couldn’t reach a satisfactory agreement with management at the bargaining table. Shortly thereafter, 95% of our pilots participated in the vote to ratify our new contract, securing $9.6 billion in additional value versus the previous agreement.

As that recent experience demonstrated, unity pays, and I encourage everyone to keep that in mind considering the contract enables APA and management to begin the next round of Section 6 bargaining in November 2026 – just over two years from now. It’s in our best interests to go into negotiations as a strongly unified pilot group. That’s how we’re going to get the contractual improvements we want and need sooner rather than later.

Unity means looking after our own, and my guess is we already do more of that than we might realize. Think of it this way: If you have a little brother, chances are you pushed him around when you were kids, but when someone else did, you stood up for him.

Whatever our path to American Airlines – whether you learned to fly in a T-6 in the military or in a Cessna 172 at your local mom-and-pop flight school – each of us worked hard to get here, and we all belong here. We’ve all endured check rides that left us sweating, and we’ve all flown trips we don’t care to repeat. Let’s set aside whatever perceived differences we may have and focus on what we have in common. We all want to enjoy full, rewarding careers as American Airlines pilots doing something that very few other people in the world know how to do, and membership unity is one of the keys to accomplishing that.

Stay safe, enjoy the holiday, and keep looking out for one another.

In Unity,

CA Ed Sicher
APA President