Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders says American Airlines' negotiating tactics with maintenance workers is "nothing more than corporate greed at its worst."
Sanders had harsh words for the Fort Worth-based American Airlines in a letter to CEO and chairman Doug Parker Wednesday, making him the latest politician to weigh into the ongoing contract dispute between the company and maintenance workers.
"If American Airlines has enough money to buy back $15 billion of its own stock, it certainly has enough money to pay its union workers a decent wage with good benefit," Sanders wrote in the letter posted to Twitter Wednesday.
American Airlines mechanics are the latest union workers Sanders has been catering too, after walking picket lines this week with striking UAW auto workers in Detroit. It's also not the first time Sanders has gone after Parker, criticizing the airline leader at a union even in April.
In August, a group of East Coast lawmakers, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, penned a similar letter to American Airlines, and criticized the company for outsourcing maintenance jobs.
The unions representing 30,000 American Airlines maintenance workers have been locked in a tedious contract dispute with the company since 2015. The two sides met with federal mediators this month.
The dispute is so bad that American Airlines sued, and won, mechanics in federal court for slowing down work on overnight maintenance lines, causing thousands of delays and hundreds of cancellations.
One of the biggest contract disputes is a plan for American to outsource as many as 5,000 jobs to contractors, according to an International Association of Machinists officials. Meanwhile, American says they are offering job protections and raises to mechanics currently employed at the company.
Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, criticized American over the lawsuit and said "American Airlines must do the right thing and agree on a fair contract to end over three years of limbo it has forced its workers to endure."
The association representing workers from legacy American Airlines and U.S. Airways have complained that American Airlines is outsourcing jobs to foreign maintenance facilities, sacrificing quality and safety for lower costs. Sanders took the side of the unions.
"American Airlines must stop risking the safety of the flying public and its own workers just to make even more profits," the letter from Sanders said.
