Airline Pilots File Class Action to Halt September 2016 Arbitration Award

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A proposed class of pilots who were employed by American Airlines before the issuance of a September 2016 arbitration award have filed a proposed class action against the Allied Pilots Association (APA) that seeks to halt the implementation of the judgment, as well as the vacation of the seniority list that accompanied the ruling. The 27 named plaintiffs allege that the APA, “in collusion with American Airlines,” failed to adequately represent proposed class members with regard to the seniority integration process and “unfair and inequitable seniority list” that resulted from the merger of American Airlines and US Airways, Inc. in December 2013.

“Among all of the labor issues relating to the employment of pilots in the commercial airline industry, the most important and most sensitive is pilot seniority,” the lawsuit says. “Higher placement on a pilot seniority list means better wages and working conditions, access to promotions, as well as quality of life issues such as the pilot’s choice of schedules and routes, the type of aircraft to be flown and rank within a given crew. Pilots on the lower end of a seniority list are also far more susceptible to possible career ending furloughs.”

The proposed class claims in no uncertain terms that the process by which pilot seniority was designated as it pertains to the fallout from the American Airlines/US Airways merger was unfair, and that the APA “agreed to the terms of a binding agreement that it knew or should have known would have (and eventually did have) serious deleterious effects on the American Airlines pilots it then alone represented.”