Your CWA Local Presidents Recommend A Strong Alliance to Maintain Our Passenger Service Careers
9-19-2005
An alliance between CWA at US Airways, and Teamsters at America West, is best for the job security, standard of living and working conditions of passenger service employees at both airlines.
The lack of an alliance would be dangerous for agents at both airlines...
With the airline industry in chaos, and employees suffering cuts at every airline, agents at US Airways and America West cannot afford an antagonistic conflict against each other that would risk our salaries, our protections and our benefits.
We have worked out an alliance which will preserve the US Airways agents' CWA contract, their CWA locals and their access to information and participation in their union.
The alliance (called Association of Airline Passenger Service Employees IBT + CWA) will allow us to remain CWA members while the America West employees remain Teamster members. US Airways agents will remain protected by the terms and conditions of their CWA contract.
In the future, the goal is to bring the AWA salaries and conditions up to the CWA contract level, and to improve aspects of the CWA contract (for example: activate our "snap backs" sooner for holidays, vacation, sickdays, premiums, etc.). We eventually want a single, improved contract protecting the entire passenger service group.
When that future, single, contract is achieved, the Teamster agents in eastern stations would be CWA-represented. The CWA agents in western stations would be Teamster-represented. The Alliance will allow us to work in a concerted effort to resolve major contract issues that would affect all members, regardless of location. But that is in the future. For now US Airways agents, East and West, remain protected by their CWA contract.
Those are big goals and we can accomplish them by working together for a united passenger service group.
For the good of our careers, for the good of our new airline, it makes sense to form an alliance between the two work groups that maintains their current representation and contract (US Airways/CWA) and status quo conditions (AWA/Teamsters).
For that reason we recommend and request that you approve this Alliance when you receive your ballot and Alliance proposal in the mail.
Thank You,
CWA US Airways Local Presidents
John Hanson, Local 1171
Pam Terry, Local 2000
Becky Gerald, Local 3640
Jose Gomez, Local 3641
John Tyler, Local 3140
Betty Grove, Local 4404
Chris Fox, Local 13302
Robert Megel, Local 13301 (acting)
US Airways CWA’ers have voted overwhelmingly for the proposed alliance…
10/13/2005
After much discussion and debate, and following the recommendations of the CWA Local President’s, the US Airways passenger service employees have voted by a margin of 84% YES to 16% NO in favor of the proposed passenger service alliance to jointly represent the US Airways and America West agents.
The CWA Local Officers and Staff want to thank all who voted and participated in the discussions prior to this vote.
We also want to assure all those who took the time to write suggestions and messages on their ballots that we will compile those messages and make them available to all local officers and staff.
The ballots were picked up from the US Post office in DC today and counted by the local presidents. The local presidents and staff will continue meeting today to discuss strategy going forward. We’ll keep you posted on these discussions and on any meetings with management (none scheduled this week - probably next week).
CWA’ers participating in today’s strategy discussion were CWA President Larry Cohen, local officers and representatives Robert Megel (13301), Sean Linehan and Pam Terry (2252), Jose Gomez (3641), Chris Fox (13302), John Hanson (1171), Vonda Hardy (3640), AFA-CWA Collective Bargaining Manager Clare Burt, CWA attorney Nick Manicone, and CWA staff Velvet Hawthorne and Rick Braswell.
Again, thanks for your participation in this important vote.
CWA Local Officers and Staff
