Janitor,
Your points are valid within your prior two posts, but you have danced around a final conclusion while asking others for an answer, and it easy to understand... our union leadership is inept.
We have group of back-slapping, poorly-educated, blue-collared good ole labor boys as our union leadership who are completely out of their league against the professional, white-collared legal and financial system against us. It is Amateur Hour and we, the members, are paying a dear price for it!
You rightfully raise the valid question in asking, "what language in your contract can you use to arbitrate the attendance issues," and it was left for management to decide? Allow me to ask this question, "Why are we paying monthly dues when something as common as an attendence policy was allowed to slide by outside of the CBA, thus the union leadership giving carte blanche to management?"
You correctly asked about a compromise in which other airlines have found acceptable as in the case of Southwest FSA's, but our "leadership" holds to a "no compromise" demand as if attendance policies are something foreign to work groups across all industries. Our "leadership" are stubborn as children digging in their heels while failing to accept they live in an adult world ruled by laws, contracts, and arbitrators. It does make for great drama with fiery speeches at the union halls and break rooms though, if it wasn't so pathetically funny in the first place.
What this union needs are truly educated professionals running this operation, and maybe an outside executive search committee to find talented people, instead of people from some ersatz academic institution like 700UW's repeated reference to the "Wizzenhutt Labor Back-Slapping Educational Center and Weekend Get-A-Way". If the membership is truly tired of getting subpar representation and repeated failures, then it needs to demand better people in charge of the union, even if it means bringing in outside professionals.
So Lambaste Jester.
Jester: Basically IMO your pretty much dead wrong in you assesment. An AGC is roughly
comparable to the company's district manager. Our former district manager was a complete
idiot. They were smart enough to get rid of him in part because of his alleged mishandling
of the HLL thing. Another match "made in heaven" was Canale and Hemenway. Hemenway
was a ramper. There's guys here that worked with him. From what they say he wouldn't
even come up to "good old boy" standards.
I don't know what the formal education level of the current officers are respectively but
my own education level is relatively high and in my conversations with them has never left
me feeling that there was any lack of intelect. I don't know where you are. I thought
you were in LAS. But if you're in PHX and are using RR as one of your examples..Good luck!
But on the fine points of the CBA etc, its the IAM lawyers (who I assume have law degrees)
who make the calls. Now you might make a case that in a battle between them and the
company lawyers they would lose.. I don't know.
For number's crunching and bean counting I would give the edge to to Parker over
Delaney-if you think they have similar roles.
I sympathize with your general distaste for democracy. But how else would a union
work? And even if there were someone making Doug's salary in charge he probably
would choose people with job experience and union experience along with intelectual
capability..kinda like we got with the new guys.
But ultimately I have to agree with Janitors idea that the CBA is all important. This
"no fault" idea has been in the wind for a while and for our last CBA to ignore it was
a mistake. BTW the IAM was succesful in language clarification right at the onset of
this policy. Had the company not backed off on some point..mainly the no fault idea,
I think that arbitration would have been in our favor.
BF
