The
recent appointments of Kevin Lum and Jack Kande to the joint negotiating
committee by the appointed UAL MEC and their rubberstamp LEC Presidents is a
perfect illustration of the way members’ wishes are ignored and loyalty to
union management valued over all else.
If for no other reason than simple common sense and good taste, the two
men responsible for the two largest negotiating failures on behalf of United
flight attendants over the past thirty years, should have been shown the door
and a new team given a chance to make WORKING flight attendants’ voices
heard. Instead, the Afa closed ranks
amidst a storm of controversy and rising discontent, and spit in the faces of
its employers.
Dissension has never been welcome by the flight attendant sector, as evidenced by the very structure of the governing bodies within the organization. Electoral participation by the membership is restricted to the lowest offices, with no say being given to the membership at ANY airline to elect their own MEC. Nor is the flight attendant sector as a whole allowed to vote on the international officers who purport to lead the entire "represented" flight attendant work force. Instead, a closed system built upon cronyism and nepotism ensures only a select few individuals are given a chance to hold these higher offices, based upon their service and acceptability to union management and not the general membership.
The
inherent flaw, of course, is that a local representative is NOT going to vote
in the interests of his or her membership if that means jeopardizing their
possible advancement in a union career with greater pay and benefits sometime
in the future. Many of our so-called “representatives” at ALL
sector levels have made no secret of their career ambitions at the parent union
level and want nothing more to do with the so called "demeaning labor" of pushing a cart up
and down an airplane aisle. They’ve
rubbed shoulders with business executives and labor leaders and had their
pictures taken with Congressional leaders after all! They can’t expect to be content with pouring
second coffees and collecting garbage, can they? And yet, those tasks are precisely what fund
their exploits.
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