FWAAA

Your post doesn't mention a key fact, and I generally give everyone the benefit of the doubt, so I assume that the omission of that key fact was not intentional.

What key fact? In February, 2012, Horton's wage & benefit concession demands to the employees included 15% first dollar profit sharing (15% of all profits, excluding special items, would be distributed to the employees), along with various cost-savings features to eliminate AA's massive wage expense disadvantage.

The APA (pilots' union) was angry at the 20% labor cost reduction demands, and sought to minimize those concessions, so the APA traded away 2/3 of that profit-sharing offered by Horton for slightly smaller concessions.

Because the unions were deathly afraid that one of the unions would negotiate a "better" deal than they were able to negotiate, the unions demanded and obtained a "me-too" provision that caused their concessions to mirror the pilots' concessions, so the APFA and the TWU immediately saw their profit-sharing cut by 2/3 in exchange for slightly reduced concessions.

Eventually, all three major unions traded away the remaining 5% (the final 1/3) of their profit-sharing in exchange for modest annual percentage increases.

In 2013, before the merger closed, and while AA was still in bankruptcy, AA earned about $1.0 billion before special items - the writing was on the wall that the unions had made a terrible choice. DL was already showing huge profits, sharing large amounts with its employees. In 2014, the combined AA+US earned $4.2 billion, excluding special items.

In 2015, AA earned $6.3 billion, excluding special items. And the pilots and FAs continue their "Delta employees got profit-sharing, so why aren't we getting any profit-sharing?"

That's chutzpah. As usual, the AA pilots and FAs take the "heads we win, tails you lose" approach.

I dislike Parker. A lot. Posting what I really think of him would likely earn me a place on the "banned" list. But the board of directors should relieve him of duty if he ever suggests that AA pay out profit-sharing to those pilot and FA ingrates. They were given profit-sharing by former management and they promptly gave it back. And now, Parker should protect them from their own improvidence?

The pilots and FAs were big boys and girls and were represented by very competent bankruptcy counsel and other advisors. Their decision to trade away profit-sharing for small reductions in the size of their concessions and for small hourly rate increases was the height of stupidity. No doubt they regret doing so, but sometimes you have to live with your really stupid decisions, and IMO, this is one of those times.

Delta has been trying to scale back its profit-sharing - the recently rejected DL pilot TA would have cut the profit-sharing substantially.

On profit-sharing, the AA pilots made a really stupid trade. They sold the profit-sharing right before the post-bankruptcy profits began to roll in. They hated Tom Horton (just like they hated every AA CEO) and many of them did not believe that AA's problems were due to its labor cost disadvantage. Many of them refused to admit that AA had higher labor costs than UA, DL or US. Consequently, they couldn't imagine that AA would become profitable.

Looks like they made some really poor financial choices. If management bails out its most highly paid employee group by making a gift of profit-sharing now that profits are huge, the employees will learn that it's always "heads we win, tails you lose," and that's not good.