It was a busy December for the CWA-afa flight attendants, with
two tentative agreements suddenly reached after YEARS of glacial negotiations
at Alaska and Spirit Airlines, and a remarkable about-face at US Airways,
wherein the representation of more than 6,700 flight attendants has been ceded
to APFA, the altogether more competent union, whose SOLE focus is the
representation and well being of American Airlines flight attendants. Indeed, APFA does not even represent the
wholly owned regional subsidiary, American Eagle, nor have they sought
representation of the US Airways regional affiliates, Piedmont and PSA, both
also now wholly owned by the merged American Airlines.
By maintaining the
focus on the attendants employed by the mainline carrier since 1977, they have
avoided the conflict of interest inherent in a labor group that simply wants as
many dues paying members on its books as it can get, despite the hypocrisy of
complaining about outsourced labor and loss of flying at the larger carriers,
but continuing to collect the same amount of money and advocating for growth at
the regional airlines.
But severe money problems and an ongoing ideological
breakdown within the AFA have caused the CWA parent union to apply pressure
on AFA “leadership” to not only finish an embarrassingly long list of open
negotiations, but to give up a multimillion dollar fight with APFA they CANNOT
win. (The CWA would have had to finance
much of that debacle, too, since the AFA flight attendant sector lists a little
over three million dollars in assets to APFA’s nearly fourteen million, despite
having a membership a third the size of the AFA). So despite Veda Shook’s insistence earlier
this year that the CWA-afa flight attendants “are just too scrappy” to allow US
Airways to be absorbed into the ranks of APFA without a prolonged and
needlessly contentious fight, economic reality and staggering ineptitude has
finally come home to roost.
The fact that her “leadership” has become so dysfunctional
and inept that the equally inept Sara Nelson and Greg Davidowitch tried to
stage a palace coup at great additional cost to WORKING flight attendants and
remove her from office in the midst of everything that is going on finally
prompted the CWA parent union to step in and cut up their credit cards. But even so, these developments are lost on
the UAL MEC and its flailing president, whose bid to secure union employment at
the international level continues to be held hostage by a true reform movement
that gathers steam on a daily basis.
There is no other union in this country that prohibits its membership
from voting for officers other than at the most basic level, and the frenzied
efforts to keep it that way, for no logical reason other than it will break up
the CWA-afa “country club” to which incumbents have grown accustomed, reveals an
arrogance and self-deluded myopia which has cost s-UAL flight attendants
dearly.
Davidowitch’s letter to the membership on December 20 does
as good as job as any in recent memory in revealing the business plan of the
AFA flight attendant sector, and why the perpetual expansion of their dues paying
base, even at the cost of higher wages for WORKING flight attendants, trumps
all other considerations. Though Mr.
Davidowitch’s sentence construction in this letter is slightly better than the
last, the thoughts expressed are as deluded and self-serving as ever and once
again seek to make a strictly emotional appeal to non-thinking flight
attendants’ sense of victimization and angst – precisely what he accused the
company of doing at the Investors’ Day meeting.
The harebrained threat that they are “prepar(ing) for all
contingencies if management should take the draconian step of putting people
out of work in violation of our Contract,” is the empty bluster and
posturing of a “leader” out of ideas and simply running to the time worn trough
of rhetoric flight attendants are accustomed to hearing. “Draconian” is defined as “very
severe or cruel…characteristic of Draco or the severe code of laws held to have
been framed by him,” laws, which included among other injustices, the
death penalty for relatively minor offenses.
But as wrongheaded and unjust as many of his laws were, he is also
credited with taking what had been a justice system at that point in Greek
history based largely on oral law and blood feuds, and instituted a codified
system wherein rules couldn’t be changed on a whim and where redress could be
sought by those who felt wronged.
So no one, in this regard, is really facing anything that
could be remotely defined as “very severe or cruel” – rather
these are circumstances, which thousands of WORKING flight attendants
recognized as probable long ago, for which the CWA-afa itself must take the
blame. No one is being put out of work “in
violation of (the) Contract” and the overt suggestion that the company
is embarking on unilateral changes to the CWA-afa CBA, thereby freeing the s-UAL
attendants to some sort of self-help (i.e. job actions) is not only ridiculous
but irresponsible.
Recall that the CWA-afa did similar posturing during the s-UAL
bankruptcy proceedings, when they argued unilateral changes to s-UAL pension
programs among other things, was a violation of collective bargaining rights
and therefore subject to immediate response from the “union.” What WORKING flight attendants got for all the
inflammatory rhetoric at the time was the spectacle of CWA-afa flight attendants
with walkie-talkies running around O’Hare airport staging CHAOS test runs to
show how prepared they were if the company took the “draconian” step of gutting
wages and benefits – including the pension plan.
The “protection” this
threat provided was that s-UAL attendants’ wages and benefits, including the
pension plan, were summarily gutted, while s-UAL officers continued to pay
themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, far more than WORKING
flight attendants could make at the time.
And so it will be here – save the tough talk, Davidowitch, and come to
terms with the fact that it is YOUR policy decisions that have brought s-UAL
attendants to this point and any reference to contingency plans is silly and
sad.
It’s difficult for many at the UAL MEC to believe, but there
are some flight attendants at s-UAL who come to work to actually earn a living
and support a family, and “having fewer Flight Attendants flying more
hours” is an opportunity to make that happen. Needlessly hiring additional workers in any
industry because of inefficient work practices is a guaranteed formula for
repeated furloughs in tough times, but the “union” is not interested in
efficiency and well paying jobs for a smaller number of attendants, because it
impacts their BUSINESS interests. Flight
attendants who are allowed to work as they choose, within the parameters of the
FARs that govern them, ultimately help contribute to a thriving company that
will be more likely to hire and RETAIN these attendants, rather than the
revolving door of hiring and furloughing the CWA-afa has contributed to at s-UAL.
Of course, according to the long, rich history of CWA skewed
surveys, s-UAL flight attendants, time and again, have indicated preservation
of long layovers away from home is preferable to efficient trip pairings, and
that lower wages are acceptable as long as inefficient work rules, often
malleable and subject to interpretation anyway, are kept above all else. Indeed, Davidowitch made sure that even
though flight attendants were having their wages cut TWICE during bankruptcy, while
he paid himself up to $111,000 per year, flight attendants’ wages remained
capped at monthly maximums, no premium was paid for exceeding quarterly flight
hour thresholds, and vacation fly-through remained prohibited – all measures
that would have given WORKING flight attendants the ability to recoup some of
what the “union” lost. The only concern
that Davidowitch had then and continues to have about the “severe consequences for (the)
community of Flight Attendants” is the impact it has on the CWA-afa’s
finances, and his continued union “career.”
Few organizations are as adept at turning a blind eye to the
truth or engage in revisionist history as proficiently as the CWA-afa flight
attendants do, and it continues unabated here.
Davidowitch’s reference to the April 6, 2009 service of notice by United
management that they intended to “seek modifications to (the 1996-2006)
Collective Bargaining Agreement” is followed by the statement that the
“union” “presented United’s proposals to you and identified key areas of concerns
(sic) with their approach.”
If that were true, the “union,” as is its right and
responsibility, would have done just that – provided WORKING flight attendants
their RIGHT to vote on the company’s offer after clearly and DISPASSIONATELY
delineating their concerns with whatever offer was on the table. Instead, these proposals were NOT presented
to the membership in the ordinary sense of the word – rather, the offer by the
company to provide s-UAL flight attendants a CAL style contract in April 2010
was not given to the membership for a vote as it should have been. Flight attendants were summarily dismissed
by union management and then TOLD they were not being allowed to vote.
It was precisely at that point in company history – six
months before the legal close of the merger in October 2010 - that Davidowitch
sealed the fate of s-UAL attendants and set up the divisive conflict that is
only now ramping up. This is a conflict
Davidowitch and the UAL MEC have planned, and wanted, since winning the representation
vote in June 2011. S-CAL flight
attendants would do well to ALWAYS keep in mind that it was never enough for
them to merely win the representation vote.
Rather, they wanted then and continue now to try to expand
their own confrontational dysfunction to the CAL work force as a substitute for
the efficient and decisive representation they simply CANNOT provide. In other words, Davidowitch and the UAL MEC
see themselves as the rightful heirs to represent ALL FLIGHT ATTENDANTS at the
combined United Airlines – the current CAL MEC is an obstacle and impediment to
their career plans and the fact that the current CAL officers have enjoyed the
success they have thus far, and will continue to enjoy as they and the CMI MEC
begin Section 6 negotiations for their own contracts later this year, is
anathema to an organization which sells delay and frustration as
“representation.”
Davidowitch’s laughably pathetic and lame manifesto
continues on page two of his letter with the statement that “we
remained undaunted and guided by you,” in the aftermath of denying
s-UAL attendants not only a vote on the CAL contract in April 2010, but a chance
to cross over in May 2011 and is a paragon of self-deluded idiocy. Any “guidance” Davidowitch needed beyond the
results of direct votes flight attendants should have been given on these
issues was the way to the exit and permanently out of WORKING flight
attendants’ lives. But the revisionism continues
with a reference to the “novel” approach of expedited mediation,
touted as something bold and new to put flight attendants on a fast track to a
better life that was actually a relic that had been dusted off from the early
1990’s with an uneven track record of success and certainly no magic bullet
that would reconcile the larger philosophical differences which remain inherent
in the three CBAs to this day. Instead,
it merely etched deeper in stone the stark divergence in a CBA written to
benefit WORKING flight attendants, and a CBA constructed to benefit union
management.
Amongst the many grammatical errors, poor syntax, and
fragmentary sentence construction frequently present in all but the most basic
of written communication from the CWA – a product a not very bright people
trying to sound smarter than they are – is the use of the word “memorialize”
when referencing portions of the contract.
In fairness, it isn’t just Davidowitch who misuses this word – it is
found in most everything that comes out of the CWA flight attendant spin
machine when writing about their “achievements.”
“Memorialize” is “to do or create something that causes
people to remember (a person, thing, or event)” and related words
include celebrate, keep, observe, enshrine, exalt, glorify, honor, bless,
consecrate, sanctify, and solemnize. A
“memorial” is something “created or done to honor a person who has
died or to remind people of an event in which many people died.” To use that word in the context
Davidowitch does is perversely appropriate since the CWA-afa flight attendants are
cultists in the most basic sense – blind adherents to a dogma that they
generally don’t understand for reasons that are unclear even to them. But to use it in this sense, when referring
to a legal document is not only wrong, but frankly ignorant. The word you are looking for, Greg, is “codified,” defined as putting together “laws
or rules…as a code or system…in an orderly form…to systematize and classify.”
Though CWA-afa flight attendant leadership likes to think of themselves as
above everyone else, smarter, with access to privileged information that
WORKING flight attendants are too stupid to understand, to speak of contractual
provisions as “solemnized” or “enshrined” is ludicrous, and therein lays the
crux of the issue. This isn’t just a
legal document to Davidowitch and the UAL MEC and JNC, meant to provide a
framework for flight attendants to work and earn as they choose, it is a holy
grail of control for union management whereby THEY dictate what is and is not
the flight attendant profession, an odd state of affairs given that most officers
and employees of the “union” never set foot on an airplane to actually do the
work they were hired to do. (Indeed,
Candace Kolander, longtime chair of the international office’s Safety
Committee, who has earned well over $100,000 per year for many years, is a
former Aloha Airlines flight attendant and is not even remotely employed by an
airline, since Aloha no longer exists.
Yet, she is more than willing to be part of an organization that tells
WORKING flight attendants how much they should earn and how they should earn
it).
And it is especially inappropriate to use “memorialize” when
referencing the wretched excuse for involuntary furlough protection found on
page 305 of the current 2010-2016 UAL CWA-afa CBA.
The CAL CBA contains an important, and one would think very obvious,
assertion that the “Company’s goal is to maintain its flight attendant group intact”
(CAL CBA Section 13 page 13-1), yet such affirmation is missing from the s-UAL
document, since the UAL MEC and international office has demonstrated repeatedly
through the years that they are more than willing to sacrifice flight
attendants’ continued employment and economic well being to try to prove a
point.
Moreover LOA 25 in the CAL CBA states that “the
Company shall not furlough any flight attendant…who was on the Continental
System Seniority List as of the date of ratification of this July 13, 2012 –
December 31, 2014 Agreement.” In
contrast there is the highly conditional and nebulous “protection” in the UAL
CWA-afa CBA that depends entirely on modifications to the 1996-2010 agreement
DIRECTLY driving the need for furloughs, when in fact no such condition exists
or will exist. Yet here is the spectacle of dear leader
Davidowitch trying to make the case that modifications to the two for one
minimum rest requirement (8 ½ in 24), and changes that resulted in the 35 in 7,
reduced vacation accrual, the quarter system elimination and other factors
which has given WORKING flight attendants a little breathing room to control
their own income, is what is responsible for s-UAL flight attendants losing
their jobs when it is Davidowitch, Kande, Lump-sum, and the entire cast of
clowns at the UAL MEC and international office and their ill-informed policy
decisions that is to blame.
The stale desperation of Davidowitch is made manifest at the
bottom of page two when he states, right out of the CWA-afa playbook, that “United
management is attempting to achieve an increase in Flight Attendants
productivity by putting people out of work…contrary to the agreement not to
involuntarily furlough any Flight Attendant as a result of productivity
improvements…management is emboldened once again to tray to manage the airline
on the back of the frontline workers.” Over
the past three decades, since Pat Friend decided that the CWA-afa flight attendant
sector was going to be THE union for every flight attendant in the United
Airlines, and green lighted Kevin Lump-sum’s ten year contract to put the
costly representation of United flight attendants on the shelf while she tried
to grow her business, this statement about frontline workers has been used so
many times as to become a tired cliché.
It is rather Davidowitch trying to manage his MEC on the
backs of s-UAL attendants who are now being put out of work because of HIS
decisions, first to deny them the opportunity to leave his sinking ship, and now
because he refuses to take responsibility for the consequences of his own
actions – the ultimate act of a coward.
CAL attendants should note that these “productivity improvements” Davidowitch
so despises are but a small step toward the efficiency and freedom to earn what
they choose that has been denied s-UAL attendants since 1973, and it is these
restrictions the UAL MEC and international office ultimately want to impose on
CAL attendants.
The working together culture he calumniates is a transparent
and miserable attempt to invite other s-UAL attendants, of which there will
sadly be many, to join in the misery and commiserate with one another about
what a bad company they work for and how mistreated and underappreciated they
are – once again time worn pages out of the CWA-afa play book that should be
recognized for the meaningless and empty rhetoric they are. The CWA-afa flight attendant sector has done a
good job over the years inculcating self-pity and negativity into the work
force, thus deflecting blame and criticism from themselves, and also lowering
expectations once tentative agreements are reached that fall far short of the
lofty promises used in stirring up needless anxiety in the process. After all, the reasoning goes, it was big bad
company management that gave us short shrift on what we are really worth, and
this was the best we could do (and resident mercenary economist Dan Akins will
be waiting in the wings to collect another paycheck from flight attendants’
dues dollars to nod his head and confirm that based on his extensive knowledge
and exhaustive research, this was all they could hope to get right now, but
we’ll do better next time).
But s-UAL attendants PAY FOR AND EXPECT THIS THEATRE, and
Davidowitch, master showman that he is, will not disappoint. Drawing upon his own managerial expertise, it
is with all due gravitas and import that he postulates “a successful company does not
put people out of work,” an observation, no doubt, that has resulted
from the many successful businesses he himself has run. Of course, it wouldn’t be a proper CWA-afa
communiqué to its membership without a least one sentence fragment, “Especially
when there is an express commitment not to do so.”
Greg gets very excited in the penultimate paragraph and his
chest swells expansively when he asserts that the MEC “has authorized me to take any
and all actions necessary to prevent United management from putting any United
Flight Attendant on involuntary furlough…we have embarked on a multifaceted
plan of action that includes ongoing discussions with management as well as
contingency planning for potential legal and grievance preparations.” Does that include another
survey?
S-UAL attendants should note that their dues dollars will
now be spent on “potential legal and grievance preparations” rather than
continued joint contract negotiations, so any hope of a joint contract prior to
2020 is just that – hope and scant hope at that. If any grievance filed on behalf of the
involuntarily furloughed flight attendants is as successful as the three that
were filed post 2010-2016 contract ratification, those flight attendants would
be well advised to make sure their resumes are up to date and not expect to
return to s-UAL at any time in the near future.
What Davidowitch and the rest of the UAL MEC and JNC will
not publicly acknowledge is that the current CAL CBA IS the joint contract –
what s-UAL attendants will get for all this delay will be THAT contract with
some minor tweaks here and there so whoever is running the UAL MEC at the time
can jump up and down and claim some sort of victory as the manifestly insecure
people they are.
But s-UAL attendants voted for this “union” and gladly pay
for this circus – they expect it, they revel in it, and they will stick with it
to the bitter end. Davidowitch is
counting on it, we can only hope he is finally proven wrong by a membership that has had enough.
LOCAL COUNCIL ELECTIONS UPCOMING FOR S-UA SPRING 2014 INCLUDE:
LAX COUNCIL 12
JFK COUNCIL 11
LAS COUNCIL 25
NRT COUNCIL 38
NOMINATE AND VOTE FOR REFORM CANDIDATES!
