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To All Active ALPA Members   -2-        January 26, 1948

information. It is a completely new approach to the problem of accomplishing easy reading of Headquarters' letter which must necessarily be long to tell the whole story. A common objection is that Headquarters' letters are too long. It's true they are long, but to attempt to tell the membership in one letter what has transpired, covering even a comparatively short period, in all ALPA departments, in Washington, and generally throughout the Association, is impossible in a short letter. In this new-approach Headquarters membership letter, we will treat each subject separately and each of such subject will be carefully titled. If you don't feel that you are interested in reading the entire letter, read the introductory part and heads first and check with a pencil in the margin the items you feel you are interested in knowing about. After you have gone through this letter in this fashion, you can then double back and read only the checked parts. In this way, you can make the letter as long or as short as you wish. You may read it all or a part, as you wish. Each part of the letter will be numbered  and titled as follows: 

      I.  1947 EMPLOYMENT AGREEMENT MAKING ACTIVITIES AND ACHIEVEMENTS. 

    To make this subject understandable, and thoroughly comprehensible, we will have to double back briefly into 1946 and even slightly further to make the story complete. 

    During the war, ALPA had its employment agreement troubles. Our efforts were divided into two parts: First, to protect our vast basic structure of employment agreements during a time of great stress and uncertainty due to war; secondly to make wartime supplemental agreements, amendments, and letters of understanding covering all of the semi-military contractual operations of the air lines. In this, we were singularly successful. It wasn't easy. By way of illustration, one phase of this work alone relating to making supplemental agreements covering overseas and international operation, lasted upward of seven months of bitter struggle. The air carriers and their ATA sought the outright destruction of all our rates of compensation, flight time limitations, and all working conditions gains we have fought through the years to establish. This move involved also the protecting of our entire legislative structure which would have been amended out of existence had it not been for ALPA. All this is now history and would take far too much time and space to recount here. 

  On August 30, 1945, the Air Line Pilots association initiated negotiations with TWA to establish rates of compensation for the larger, faster, and more productive equipment, namely the DC-4 and the Constellation type aircraft. After considerable see-sawing, the Company withdrew from mediation on December 19, 1945, Messrs. Richter of TWA, Damon of AA, and Herlihy of UAL got together and organized the Airlines Negotiating Committee, a branch of ATA. It was as carefully planed and well-financed move to destroy all of the basic and highly valued employment agreements of the air line pilots made individually with each air line company. This was the signal for one of the most terrific struggles that ALPA has ever waged. The full story on this, all of intimate details and ramifications , its pathos, its killing pace, can be related to you first-hand by your delegate to the 9th Convention. He will be able to tell you the story of ALPA's darkest days as it was related to this Convention on its opening day, February 18, 1947. It will be well worth your time to learn about this important link in ALP's long chain of happenings. [Underline[Chiefly, it amounted to the air carriers launching their long-planned postwar "big push" to destroy all the pilot's employment agreements made with individual companies, and all the year of priceless, sharply-contested gains they represent, and to replace all this with one meaningless industry-wide agreement covering all the pilots and copilots of all the companies.END UNDERLINE]]