Jim,
The obvious reason why non-incurred fuel data is shown on financial statements is because it is HEDGED in a financial transaction for which the company exchanges money or the promise of it if they are wrong. There is no hedging of labor costs, unionized or not.
Non-incurred labor costs do not show up on any company’s financial statements in any form.
Companies –and labor unions - compare incurred and non-incurred costs for the purpose of negotiating labor contracts – but only the final costs of the agreed upon contract become public.
That’s the way the process works, Jim.
If you want to convince companies to change the way they are required to account for costs to show the costs they did not incur, go for it. And let me know how it all works out.
Glenn,
Any airline is going to use the same principle for its maintenance work as it uses for any other cost – seek the best quality at the lowest cost. If you or others expect that DL will pay its mechanics just to keep a US payroll large, you will be in for a surprise. Thankfully, few DL mechanics believe that line of thought and do high quality work that competes with the best global providers.
The Mexico hangar is being opened because it is part of the maintenance joint venture with AM in which each partner does work which it is most specialized in and capable of doing on the same basis – best quality and lowest price. That is why DL’s effective outsourcing is about 15% if you factor in the insourcing DL does and even that number is bloated because of the aircraft mods that DL is doing.
Your own peers acknowledge that ATL’s Tech Ops facilities are full and they fill available space with work when it becomes available.
Given that DL is retiring a number of older aircraft in the next few years and its burst of mod activity will die down, Tech Ops is likely the right size for Delta.
BTW, in your fears that DL will outsource more maintenance, you might want to factor in that AA is soaking up huge amounts of MRO capacity as it implements outsourcing contracts in a very short order that will far surpass the size of NW’s.
Kev,
DL does have a peer appeal process and if you aren’t aware – I’m sure you really are, though – search for “appeals process” and then look at the HRPM and APM, some of which you must be on a DL owned computer to access.
The process you described is a criminal law process. If unions have succeeded in creating a process based on criminal law, then they are not addressing the real issue since employment is governed by employment.
DL’s appeals process absolutely does result at times in employees walking out of the appeals process and back onto the job. One of your own active employee colleagues has stated as much. It is fantastical to think DL is capable of stacking the appeals process with your peers of DL’s choosing that will continually back mgmt at the expense of their employees is not supported by the reality that your peers very much do side with employees – and there are statements showing that to be true.
If your expectation is that there will never be expectations of performance for DL employees and that any attempt to hold employees to that standard is wrong, then you will be mistaken and you will also find little support from your DL peers on that point. At times, there will be DL employees, as with any large group of employees who either are not capable of producing at the levels DL expects or who engage in activity or behavior which DL says is incompatible with even reasonable expectations between a company and an employee.
The vast majority of people in the US do not want to work alongside someone who cannot or will not do their job – and the 99+% of employees who do their job have absolutely no problem with expectations about doing their job and being held to those standards via a performance evaluation process.
There are a lot of PMNW employees who now subject to performance evaluations after years of not being a part of that process. It is a given that there will be employees, regardless of PMNW, PMDL, ex-PA, or new hire within 6 months that will wash out of the process.
But there is indeed a process for informing those personnel that their performance is lacking, detailed expectations about what has to be done to correct that performance, and definite timelines for avoiding escalation of the matter.
Four years after the merger was announced, it is obvious that your goal remains to convince DL people that they need unions. I commend you for your convictions and your willingness to fight for what matters to you. But since you have taken your campaign to a non-DL employee website, presumably to reach a bigger audience, then you subject yourself to being fact-checked by people like me who do know the truth, even if I, like Wings, will never decide the issue regarding representation.
The reality is that your peers don’t see the problem you see or at least don’t believe a union can fix the problem if they do see it.
Keep fighting for what you believe. Just don’t be surprised if there are people who don’t support you inside DL because they do not object to DL’s expectations, they are capable of meeting DL’s expectations, and have no desire to defend those that don’t or can’t meet those expectations. Don’t be surprised if there are people outside of DL who challenge the basis of the claims you make regarding the need for representation.
If your peers believe there is a need for a union, they will start the process and if the company is negligent, the employees will seat a union or two. History, once again, shows that DL employees outside of the pilots in the major groups, have not been capable of garnering enough support for the idea that DL employees are worse off than their union peers.
