April 2012 Labor Committee Report for the IBT/CW Association Membership

Doug Parker, CEO started out the meeting by saying the entire Board of directors are now using I-Pads for all of their documents to save on paper for their Board meetings.

He introduced and welcomed Capt Gary Hummel, the new President elect for USAPA to his first meeting.

He stated that the revenue environment is doing well due to the fact the entire industry environment is very strong. They will be releasing the quarterly earnings on Wednesday, April 25.

He continued to say the Company is doing well, there are no surprises, we lost money in 2011 in the 1st quarter, we are loosing less in 2012's 1st quarter. We are not going to have a profit this quarter but we feel strongly we will make money overall in 2012, as we did for the full year of 2011.

The operations report is stellar and all of your members are doing a fantastic job in each of the workgroups. Records were set for fewest mishandled bags this past quarter and the ramp is doing a phenomenal job. We are very proud of the Industry award from Aviation Week and Overhaul & Maintenance magazine for technical excellence during the publication's annual aviation maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) awards.

Scott Kirby, President, noted that it is great that we are making up for last year, it comes from industry consolidation, capacity being reduced and no one is growing into new markets. We are able to pass the cost of fuel prices off to the customer which is a big help.

Doug stated that another project we are working on is an investigation with doing something with AMR. We hired advisors and we have asked them to figure out if something made sense, that work continues. This will go on for a long time due to BK taking a long time. (see other article on the deals US has made with the 3 Unions at AA since this meeting to garner their support for a merger).

The IBT/CWA Association representatives raised the following issues in the meeting on behalf of the membership;

We again advised the company that the attendance policy needs to be relaxed and that they should deal with the employees who have serious attendance issues. We advised the members of the labor committee that we presented Donna Paladini a comparison of the two different attendance policies for the customer service group, ATO and RES in an earlier meeting. She advised us she would review and consider our input.

The following was addressed directly to Doug Parker and the 3 Board members regarding our recent bargaining session;

We want to express our concerns about “customer service” Yes we represent the members of “customer service” but we are also concerned about the slow and steady loss of our jobs to automation- which in turn causes a loss of the “human touch” to our customer's service. Yes, we know that automation is the future and has been and will be for many years, but we don’t have the means to cover the holes in customer service when things go awry when the “automation” fails or has a glitch with the current staffing numbers.

The company did not increase headcount to cover the additional weeks of vacation and holiday weeks from our snap backs.

Response from the company in the meeting as we mentioned this:

“yes we have been given the ok from finance to increase the headcount through transfers from downsized ATO’s and upgrading PT to FT in many locations, we also did not reduce the numbers as we normally would during the recent schedule changes and reduction due to the slot swap in LGA and the ATO’s we flew to out of LGA”.

We understand when weather causes havoc in the operation, but in many of the mandatory overtime cases we have been made aware of, the weather, irregular operations or unusual events, had nothing to do with mandatory overtime. Poor planning on management’s part when putting together a schedule, such as the DCA Inauguration meltdown a few years ago, is one example of what causes our staffing shortages. Sick calls and special events a manager was not aware of or did not plan for that brought a higher passenger load to a particular airport is also a major problem we deal with in smaller ATO’s.

We need to look at the cost of hiring more employees’ vs. the cost of the complaints from customers and the loss of their business.

Our bargaining team predicted we would get some outsourcing proposals in bargaining and sure enough, the company bargaining team recently proposed a new “ready reserve” article. It is clear from this proposal the Company’s desire to allow non-Union workers to make up 25% of our workforce, which in turn means furloughing the very people who sacrificed to make this company the success it is today. This proposal would bring in a “B” scale group of workers who would work without benefits, without earning seniority and without regard to our member’s right to earn a decent living. The proposal was to allow these non-union workers to be scheduled up to 30 hours a week. We have union workers right now in some small locations i.e.; SRQ, TUS, working 2 hours a day, not by choice. It is not worth driving to work based on the price of gas today for 10 hours a week.

The IBT/CWA Association will not sign a tentative agreement that allows ANY outsourcing of ANY kind, including allowing managers to perform our work on a regular basis.

If you want us to reach an agreement in a timely manner, not 6 or 7 years from now, recognize the sacrifices this group has made in the last decade and make comprehensive proposals we can bring back to our workgroup that the Union leadership and the elected negotiating team can endorse without fear of what happened in the Flight attendant group recently.

We have a very good history of working with the company, we negotiated an integration agreement in 6 months during the merger and we represent the largest group of employees on the property.

Do not slight this group and do not waste our time with any proposals that demand we give up our jobs or take anything less then we have today.

Doug, we want you to know that the news of this one proposal has lit a fire under the IBT/CWA Association membership and they are now asking the Union leadership when they can take action.

We have always come to this table and been brutally honest with you, today is no different. Show respect to the workers for their sacrifices in the past at the bargaining table and they will work harder to make this the best company there is.

Keep an eye out for the new CWA US Airways member's facebook page we are building!