UAL, CAL, CMI F/A'S WILL WORK TOGETHER

The NMB has ruled that the AFA did break many of their election rules during last years campaign but that none of the violations were grievous enough to warrant a re vote.

At no time in recent memory has the fomenting of mistrust of all information sources other than the afa's been as acute as it was during last years representation campaign. When rational and intelligent conversation was needed to debate the merits of three (CMI included) vastly different labor contracts and compare the value offered by two different labor unions' cultures and styles, flight attendants were instead subjected to a quickly devolving series of events in airports and in the social media that had little to do with facts and more to do with emotional outbursts and the shrill hysteria that has characterized the afa's "representational" style for more than three decades. Of course, last year's election was won not by standing on a record of past afa achievements (ie: number of contracts negotiated and ratified for the ongoing benefit of WORKING flight attendants), but by threats, coercion, misinformation, and blatant disregard of NMB voting rules.

It is now time for all parties to come together for the good of the ENTIRE flight attendant population at the new United Airlines.

We challenge the subsidiary United afa to abandon its "alternative knowledge" system, with its own "facts", its own "history" and its own laws of economics and EMPOWER their members by making changes to the Constitution and Bylaws which would allow DIRECT member voting in ALL matters that affect the membership. Including, but not limited to, election of Joint Negotiating Committee members and Union Officers at ALL levels of the organization.

Until changes are made at the AFA to totally empower its membership and become a truly democratic Union, the FACC will continue to aggressively question and contest AFA "leaderships" decisions AS IS OUR RIGHT TO DO SO, FREE FROM INTIMIDATION OR HARASSMENT. The total environment of "pseudo-facts and pretend information" constructed by the CWA-afa for the s-United flight attendants consumption will no longer stand uncontested. 

WE CHALLENGE THE AFA TO CHANGE AND EMPOWER ALL ITS MEMBERS SO THAT ALL FACTIONS WITHIN THE ORGANIZATION CAN MOVE FORWARD TOGETHER.

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DEADLINE LOOMS FOR EARLY OUTS.

 

 

Only a few more days before the Early Out offer closes.

Aircraft redeployment's, sub bases opening, routes changing hands from one subsidiary to another, will base closures be far behind? You bet they will! Those who take the early out will be off the payroll by the end of August. The Company will only have so many options to balance the subsequent domicile populations on the UA side.

And beware, AFA  has negotiated meaningless language concerning protections for international base closures.

 

EVERYTHING the UAL MEC has done seems to be for the sole purpose of playacting and posturing while they fervently hope as many people as the Company allows will take the early out option, so there will be as few of us left as possible to witness first hand their utter selling out of the s-United membership!!

REMEMBER:                                                      

The number of Early Out offers are at the “sole discretion” of the Company! (TA page 61). Will it be more than 1000? Less?

And for those of us who stay, back on reserve after 30 years??

 

ASK YOURSELF THIS: Would the Company need to institute all these changes if the AFA had negotiated a Joint Collective Bargaining Agreement after the election, almost a year ago?

   Hmmmmm……………………….

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"When people learn no tools of judgment and merely follow their hopes, the seeds of political manipulation are sown."

                                                                                                                     -Stephen Jay Gould-

                                                           

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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UNITED TO OPEN NEW F/A BASES!



afa: "We're going to get the money"
"We're going to save your jobs"

NEWS FLASH!             

Yesterday, May 15th, United Airlines announced the opening of new bases for Subsidiary Continental Flight Attendants in LAX, ORD, DEN, SFO and IAD. Also new bases for subsidiary United flight attendants in IAH and JFK (EWR co-terminal). These bases to be opened in the fall of 2012 and spring of 2013. Read Sams' Update on "Flying Together", full letter here.

Stay tuned for our next email newsletter.

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NEWS UPDATE: CHICAGO MEC MEETING

AFA RETREADS..........

From behind closed doors in the back room of the AFA UA MEC Board of Directors meeting in Chicago yesterday emerges the infamous Kevin Lum and Jack Kande as the two "appointees" to the UA Joint Negotiation Committee.

***It is interesting to note today the lengths that the MEC web site goes to in reiterating how the MEC participated in the "democratic" process - when in fact there is no democratic process at all for WORKING flight attendants. Their participation ends, as we all know, at the local council level and that representation in turn is compromised by a local president whose political views and votes are solely informed and motivated by her/his political and career aspirations within the CWA/afa and have nothing whatsoever to do with what a membership may or may not want.***

***Was the membership informed that there were 13 candidates for these two positions? Where their resumes' posted anywhere for the membership to read? How was the membership to know who the candidates were so we could let our LECP's know who we wanted them to vote for? And this is supposed to be a "democratic" union?!? Hardly.*** 

  

Thank You AFA for being so member driven and having the vision and foresight to set us back twenty years! 

More on this development in our upcoming email news letter.   




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UA ALPA Pilots Request Release To Cooling Off Period!

On April 16th, 2012, ALPA MEC Chairman Captain Jay Heppner opened the week-long MEC Meeting in Chicago. For nearly 24 months there has been little progress on the core issues related to the off shoring and outsourcing of UA pilots jobs. United Airlines alone has 1,437 pilots who were laid off because of 9/11 and merger schemes, and they continue to be grounded.

United Airline Pilots plan to formally execute a release from their Section 6 negotiations under the Railway Labor Act (RLA) on April 30 if United management does not commit to completing these negotiations by June 1.

www.ualmec.org/

United Airlines prepares Boeing 737 order
United Airlines plans to order at least 100 Boeing 737 jets, sources say. The deal will focus on the Boeing 737 MAX, a fuel-efficient upgrade to the 737 that is scheduled to enter service in 2017. At list prices, the 737 MAX runs around $100 million per plane. Reuters (5/3)


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Challenging UA MEC to Survey Membership for the Combined Contract!

TWO SIMPLE QUESTIONS

 

• What sections of the UA contract would you like to see changed in a combined contract?                          

• Specifically how would you change them?

The CAL MEC received over 30,000 responses from its 9,000 plus membership with survey questions prioritizing what their members wanted in the current single contract negotiations with the company - THESE NEGOTIATIONS STARTED TODAY !

UA MEC, Don't waste our time and dues money on another skewed survey designed to benefit the union and not the membership!!! 

LET US DECIDE OUR OWN FUTURE!

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AFA REPRESENTATION ELECTION VIOLATIONS

"The RLA states that elections shall be free from interference, influence, or coercion."
                         Afa's alleged violations include:

• Use of Another voter's identification numbers
• Refusing to maintain confidentiality
• Refusing to maintain integrity of voting process
• Creating "hot" hyperlinks to interfere with voting process
• Coercion
• Intimidation & Harassment
• Bullying on Social Networking Sites

The NMB CONTINUES , (Maria-Kate Dowling or Angela Heverling), to find representation election violations and is requesting ALL flight attendants affected by Afa violations to contact them as soon as possible. Intimidation & Harassment included LEC's having IAM supporters arrested in ORD and attempted arrests orchestrated by LEC's in SFO. It included multiple phone calls to the homes of flight attendants, blacklists, and verbal insults and threats including physical intimidation.

The violations by the Afa were often blatant with malice intended toward their dues paying members. Flight attendants in many UA domiciles were afraid to openly support or appear in support of the IAM. Many UA f/a's were threatened not to wear their IAM pins if they knew what was in their best interest.

The same Afa LEC and MEC officers subsequently failed to deliver any of the false promises they made, including a better contract than CAL's IAM negotiated contract, retroactive pay, and/or preventing UA furloughs.

Then Afa Raised the Dues of UA Flight Attendants and Rewarded Themselves, the Afa Officers, with 30% Plus Raises!!!

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FACC.

AFA LEC PRESIDENT TELLS FACC TO "MAN UP.....WHO ARE YOU?"

IAD LEC President demands to know who we are............Really??

Anonymity is not a lack of courage, nor an inability to “man-up,” but rather a conscious decision driven by the organizational philosophy of the FACC which puts community and the collective good above the ego of any one individual.

With only lip service paid to the notion of the collective good of ALL flight attendants beyond their own cult-of-personality circle, it is difficult for the CWA-afa flight attendant sector to grasp the concept that no one individual at the FACC seeks to take personal credit, thereby elevating their own sense of self-worth and “importance” as we see all too often in the so-called “leaders” of the CWA-afa. 

The very fact that one LEC President, in particular, has taken it upon himself to consistently attack and deride the FACC speaks volumes of his own personal ambition beyond the LEC level, rather than any attempt to genuinely promote the collective good.  In other words, the time he spends doing this is meant to impress his “peers” at the MEC and international levels, when his time would be better spent tending to the affairs of his council for which he more than amply compensates himself with flight attendants’ dues money.

True courage, or “manning-up,” would be to see an LEC President actually support changes to the CWA-afa Constitution and Bylaws requiring “leadership” at ALL LEVELS be elected by the members, and not subject to the back room politicking and popularity contests that currently drive MEC and international officers elections.

“Manning-up” would be for CWA local “leaders” to demand that ALL employees of the CWA flight attendant sector publicly and fully disclose every penny they have been paid in monthly allowances for officers, and detailed, ITEMIZED accounting on the thousands of dollars of reimbursed expenses, now listed on federally required LM-2 reports only as “representational activities.”  “Man-up” and demand

THOSE changes of your current MEC and international leadership on behalf of the membership, and see how long your union career lasts after that.

The FACC serves as a repository of information taken from publicly available sources, and merely verifies edits and distributes the information it receives from the thousands of readers who care to submit material.  We are a counterweight to the one-sided myopia of an organization that long ago chose to put its own business interests above those of the very people paying their salaries.

It is not surprising that the CWA flight attendant sector, bereft of a driving philosophy beyond self-promotion and the economic benefit of its “leaders,” now finds itself imploding – removing an MEC President less than a week before a vote tally on a joint contract tentative agreement that was six and a half years in the making at one airline, and mired in a three-way contract contest at another, that promises to make the America West/US Airways debacle look tame in comparison.

When self-aggrandizement and ego-driven manipulation are the prime motivators of the “leadership” level in any organization, it is doomed to fail and must resort to fear-driven tactics of intimidation and grotesque distortion of the truth in order to survive.  On the other hand, an organization that simply serves the interests of its membership can lead by example alone, and has little need to explain itself.

Anonymity is not a lack of courage, but rather the absence of ego – it is only the collective good of a combined work force working until a combined contract with an integrated seniority list NOW – not six years down the line - that is the aim of the FACC. 

No one person dictates the terms or direction of the group.  That is the very definition of “member-driven” and the purest form of democracy.  

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CROSSOVER BIDS AWARDED......

                                                       

One hundred fifty-seven of our flying partners at s-United have elected to avail themselves of the opportunity to participate in the cross over flying program.  That number may change slightly once the ten day grace period has ended, though it won’t be by much.

The seniority range extends from 1/19/1976 through 3/18/2008, the majority falling between 1997 – 2008.  Those at the top of the pay scale at s-United, in addition to the ten percent bump thanks to the recently ratified 2010-2016 agreement; will receive another $9.10 an hour for domestic fliers and $6.08 internationally.  They will receive a $2,500 cash payment for incidental expenses related to the move to their new base, and higher per diem rates than those currently paid to s-United attendants.

As reserves, they are guaranteed eighty-three hours per month, and will spend far less time sitting idly at home as the Continental subsidiary continues to take delivery of new aircraft and aggressively expands flying opportunities.

s-United cross over attendants are now at the bottom of the Continental seniority list for bidding purposes behind several classes of new hires that have filtered through the Continental training center since October 2011.  Not only would they have been senior to these same new hires had they been permitted to exercise their freedom of choice last year when the company first offered the crossover, but the rate of hiring that has gone on since last October may very well have lifted them off reserve status by now – an eventuality that may still happen later this year depending on the base and the shifting allocations of flying, but that was unnecessarily delayed and sacrificed for the CWA’s own political ends.

The point that cannot be stressed enough – this CHOICE was denied to s-United flight attendants nearly a year ago in the midst of the representation campaign as a political tool for “union” management at the expense of the welfare of a small number of flight attendants who may have opted to participate.

It is with our best wishes for the future and good luck that we bid goodbye, for now, to the s-United cross over participants.  Given the ongoing meltdown at US Airways and the fact that the THREE different MECs at United have agreed to continue to work on SEPARATE contracts for the foreseeable future, (with the international officers’ blessing), it will be a long while before we see them again.  In the meantime, we will all learn firsthand from our crossover friends of the benefits of the IAM negotiated contract, to which improvements are already being planned by the Continental MEC.