To Fanblade

[Guest GDR]

All the posts were getting scrambled in another thread below and I wanted to reply to you.

Your contention was that employees taking a hair cut wasn't going to solve things and that we had too much management.You also didn't accept the fact that Milton plans to change the way we do business. I hope that I have summarized your position correctly.

Milton has stated that mangagement ranks are going to be thinned. He has said that he will take a 33% cut himself. That is happening, but management are employees, just as you and I are, and as you said earlier a pay cut by employeees is not going to fix the basic problem.

It was Milton that first said the model is broken. It was Milton that first said that we will have to change the way we do business. It was Milton who said that the full service carrier is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. It is Milton that said, "Air Canada must be low cost - especially in North America where the greatest immediate threat exists".

Frankly it has been the employees and gov't that have resisted the change. We have done it one way for our whole careers and it isn't easy to think that now we are going to have to change the way we've always done things just because a young up-start like WJ comes along and starts taking our customers from us.

As someone put it to me recently, in Milton's relatively short tenure in office he has had to face the "perfect storm". If someone wrote a work of fiction about this it would be considered unbelievable. If things could possibly go wrong they have, from gov't interference, to 9/11 and now we have an airborne plague.

Gov't doesn't like him, many employees don't like him, but our biggest shareholder, does. Here is a quote from Sat's G&M.

>>>"I think it would be madness to change management," said Jeremy Hosking, co-founder and partner of Marathon Asset Management, believed to be Air Canada's largest shareholder, which will likely see most of its investment evaporate under the airline's planned restructuring.

"The only people who understood that Air Canada had a very serious problem seems to be the management of Air Canada. So getting rid of them for correctly analyzing, diagnosing and trying to execute a solution seems to be a bit peculiar. You might as well shoot your doctor."<<<

Now Marathon, even after losing millions in AC stock, wants to invest in the restructured company and they want Milton to lead it. Hopefully employees will get behind this as well. We need a srong personality to lead us through this and not someone out to win a popularity contest. I happen to think Milton's the guy, and in case you think that I have some kind of axe to grind

I'm just a unionized employee who has never even met the man.

JMHO

Greg Robinson