The flexibility of the CS policy benefits the company just as much as the employees. Many of us have become the secondary income earners in our homes, so if something comes up guess who will have to deal with it? You aren't going to put the better job at risk to save your AA job. So if people cant CS then people will call in sick, and mechanics normally make the call a weekly one because of the penalty. For several years management at JFK, citing the high number of sick calls, didn't assign anybody off at Christmas. What happened? Each year sick calls went up, and what was worse is instead of just being short on the slow travel day of Christmas itself they would be short people all week due to the tendency of mechanics to call in for the whole week since the penalty. So then they started assigning a lot of guys off on Christmas and the problem went away. They may be short the one day but the heavy travel days around Christmas they had no shortages.
Tighten up on CS rules and those who rely on them, often the same people who go above and beyond, will either push back, or leave. A former manager at JFK used to constantly threaten to tighten up or do away with CS's , I said "Go ahead", we both knew that people would take the day anyway and the company would be the one scrambling to have coverage and end up paying more OT.
A flexible CS policy directly reduces OT and indirectly improves productivity. It costs the company nothing.
