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To ALL ALPA Members-13
January 15, 1951

on New Year's Eve. I have worked through the entire Christmas Holidays, and late every night, preparing for the hearings before the AA Presidential Board. Stop and think about that. Put yourself in these kinds of boots.  No vacation for 20 years and no week-ends - just plain seven days per week for 20 years, which is all well and good enough for me because I am a hearty old buzzard and love to work creatively - and ALPA is my first love - and I can take it.  But, remember, my wife also hasn't had a vacation for 20 years.  And recently, because of ALPA's ever dwindling central fund, I haven't even collected for the vacation s I haven't taken in the past several years.  I left this money in the central treasury to bolster up our working funds.  All this seems fine and good until some character - and we have them in our membership as do all organization - slaps the already shaky central treasury with a flight pay loss bill that rocks us right down to our heels, and then scream like a Comanche Indian if it gets the red pencil treatment or isn't paid immediately.

Coming back again to my own schedule, I intend, as soon as the AA case ends, to take one day and one evening a week off. My wife and I are looking forward to this like a couple of kids.  That's what it has cost to build ALPA - 20 vacationless years and no week-ends or other time off.  I tell you these things so that the members will realize what the price has been to build the pilots' representing organization, one of the best in the world, and will take care of it. 

Relating to more money for the air line pilots, and particularly for the copilots, there has been no little amount bargained into the picture in the last two years.  On the contrary, there have been millions of dollars, and there is a substantial raise for the air line pilots and particularly the copilots of the larger companies, and many other benefits, all backed up behind the mileage limitation battle shortly to be in progress in New York and Washington.  Are we going to just take some money, give up the mileage limitation and suffer on working conditions, and when all new equipment comes on your air line, as it did on AA - and it's already ordered - experience what happened past until we achieve the success we richly deserve?  In 1946, AA employed 1291 pilots; in 1949 and early 1950, they dropped to 740, losing 551, and think of the resulting demotions!  In the face of this types of warning, surely we can't act like butterflies on the last warm days of summer, for there's a hard winter ahead.  The AA boys have had their hard winter - 551 of their number laid off in three years.  The pilots of any of the companies when they equip, and they will, with faster, larger, and more productive equipment, are in line for the same kind of shrinkage in the number of pilots employed and the same resultant demotions.  I know the answer.  We will al fight like men, as we always have, but we must be told in the field what the fight is all about and it's just that we aim to do.  

We can be smug and complacent and say it can't happen on our air line, but we can't get away from the facts, and 551 AA pilots laid off and an equal number demoted in less than three years are the cold, hard, undeniable facts.  Once this problem is solved, the wage increases that