US Fleet Service Topic 4/30-

[doing it on my knees]

Well, after reading the last few posts, it seems to me like the ramp olympics are once again in order.
EAST vs WEST for all of the bragging rights... that and 2bucks will get you a coffee at McDonalds.

This "E v W" argument is like republicans and democrats, muslims and christians, yankees and red sox. There will never be a outright winner as long as there is one surviving person from either side. Let it go.
I work with whatever or whoever I have to, to get the job. Sometimes safe, sometimes "Unsafe", bottom line is to get these passengers where they are going with their bags.
Just don't get taken advantage of, which is what I think us "Westies" have let happen all of these years.

To all of those who I have spoken with via PM, in regards to my looooong pending move to CLT. I sold my house, finally and I am presently in CLT looking for a house.
Hopefully, the transfer will happen quickly.
I know most people on the board are probably like "BIG DEAL! Let's keep arguing!" so here is something to argue about... GO METS!!!!!!!!!!

 

[700UW]

Jester,

Your posts are an insult to the hard working rampers at this company I spent 18 years at US and we had some of the best workers, and remember the company staffs and determines how a flight is worked, not the workers.

I worked in CLT for 14 years and the rampers are some of the best in the industry.

 

[Harry Callahan]

CLT shift mgr R.C. on the warpath....................
Changing the subj. alittle shift mgr R.C. waging the war on illegal hats. RC picking on certain agent about "illegal" hat when you got all these others running around with pants down to their butts & everything else & no one will say a word. Kinda makes me wonder if you get my drift :down: :down:

It's sad when that's all that some one who calls himself a manager has to do.

 

[robbedagain]

doing it on knees, congratualtions on your house thing and hope you get to clt asap and as for mets lets go mets

 

[cltrat]

CLT shift mgr R.C. on the warpath....................
Changing the subj. alittle shift mgr R.C. waging the war on illegal hats. RC picking on certain agent about "illegal" hat when you got all these others running around with pants down to their butts & everything else & no one will say a word. Kinda makes me wonder if you get my drift :down: :down:

It's sad when that's all that some one who calls himself a manager has to do.

Harry you have to pretty much consider the source there he is pretty much useless otherwise and has to try to justifly his position somehow

 

[Jester]

and remember the company staffs and determines how a flight is worked, not the workers.

And the CBA has nothing to do with it, not to mention, the endless whining of "abuse" from the ramp and the grievences filed, along with the accompanying threats of illegal job actions? Based on what you are saying, it would appear that the Union is unable to check management from "unsafe" working conditions. So which is it? Union has influence (thus it isn't solely Management discretion and the Union is culpable) or the Union is powerless (so why bother paying union dues or filing complaints)? You cannot have it both ways.

So Unmasks Jester.

 

[700UW]

Illegal work actions?

Working by the book, (which the company writes) is not an illegal job action. If every ramper worked exactly by the company rules, flights would be at a standstill.

Filing a grievance? that is every member's right when the CBA is violated, that CBA is agreed to by the company and when they violate it they have to be held accountable.

Since you have worked for HP and been at the bottom of the barrel and havent been through the tough fights that the east has gone through you have no idea of what you talk about.

Ask the East employees about what the company did to them in 1992 when they were non-union?

You are benefiting off the backs of what the East rampers endured and fought for and you have the audicity to criticize them, and you wonder why the union has solidarity issues, look in the mirror and you will see the answer to that problem

 

[Jester]

Illegal work actions?

If every ramper worked exactly by the company rules, flights would be at a standstill.

Filing a grievance? that is every member's right when the CBA is violated, that CBA is agreed to by the company and when they violate it they have to be held accountable.... You are benefiting off the backs of what the East rampers endured and fought for and you have the audicity to criticize them, and you wonder why the union has solidarity issues, look in the mirror and you will see the answer to that problem

And you don't consider that a threat to shutdown the airline? Management isn't stupid and neither am I, so don't feign innocence while making threats of what is possible all under the guise of "work safe".

And while all those Easties were demanding rights (along with so many other union members in other industries) their jobs were being exported to the 3rd world. When it is a trade unionist greatest moment in the airline industry to shutdown Eastern Airlines whereby everyone lost their jobs, then one should begin to realize the nihilistic path by fighting in-house versus focusing on our real opponents as being rival airlines. Southwest understands this, shame that US cannot.

By the way, you parried my question on the question of staffing gates, so let's try again, "So which is it? Union has influence (thus it isn't solely Management discretion and the Union is culpable) or the Union is powerless (so why bother paying union dues or filing complaints)?" Think carefully, because you cannot have it both ways.

So Evaluates Jester.

 

[JoeDirt]

Doing it

Hope you get that x-fer real soon. PM if you have any questions about anything around CLT.

 

[ChockJockey]

Hey Harry and cltrat,

Your posts go to exactly what I have been harping on for some years now. If my understanding of Fleet Service is correct you guys are the ones who get my bag off the inbound flight and hustle it over to my connecting fligh to some God forsaken southern rat hole city.

Oh Piney, were I ever to see you in the terminal I'd bull rush you, give you a great big bear hug and then a great big kiss on the cheek. When will you next be in PHX? Complimentary freelance consultancy in the fleet service thread? Hot dog!

So let's go back to the concept of Happy Employees are required to in order to ensure happy customers. In this case we have a manager who apparently has nothing better to do then police the attire that a worker places upon his or her head.

Now in the overall scheme of life this is not the end of the world, but let's consider the possible consequences for a minute. Let's say I'm oh a 26 year employee with a Mets hat on instead of a US hat. Boss orders me to take the hat off. I comply. Now ask yourself how motivated am I to run a bag that got left behind to make a connecting flight or just "accidentally" not see it?

Willfully allowing bags to miss is not a "consequence" of one being advised to wear his or her correct hat, as calling it such implies that the agent had no choice given the circumstances, or that this would likely happen given the type of people FF's seem to think rampers are. No matter how pissed off a ramper is at the company or a manager or god or whoever it should never be taken out on the passenger. Ever. I know that this is not a universally-held opinion among rampers but if I were to ever see someone try to purposefully misdirect a bag I would first retrieve the bag and get it where it needs to go or if it were to miss, I would consider telling the expedite office or maybe even the ROC management what happened, even if that does mean ratting out on another agent.

I don't bust my arse each day to try to give the pax (on at least the flights I work) the perception that we have some measure of professionalism just to have them punished because one person wasn't allowed to share his love of the Mets with the world (Better the Mets than the Yankees though). IMO, a 26-year veteran that has so much invested in his time with the company and still plays games like this should have probably been let go 25.5 years ago.

Ponder if you will the thought that if the Manager in question would create a positive work environment then workers would want to wear the correct hats and be uniform compliant and perhaps even be proud to say "I work for US Airways"

Who determines whether or not the work environment is "positive"?

Think about it.

The perception of positivity or negativity is purely subjective to the individual. That is to say that to a point, the person determines where his work environment falls on the positive-negative spectrum and it is this perception that can have an effect on productivity. Obviously most people will feel they work in a negative environment if their manager is a sadist and the only tools available to do their job are a broken tug, a nightwand with a missing battery, and some old pair of kneepads found lying around that smell kind of like pickled cheese. Personally I consider most of the work environments in PHX to be positive or at least adequate, and I don't have a lot of patience for belly-achers if I don't feel their concerns are legitimate.

I could go to CLT and watch y'all work from from the terminal window and conceivably say that you also seem to have a positive work environment but in this context my opinion is irrelevant because 1.) CLT is not PHX, and 2.) I've never worked in CLT and so can't say for certain what the work environment is really like.

Nobody here thinks the issue is so simple that there's a MAKE WORK ENVIRONMENTS POSITIVE button (it would be green) somewhere in Tempe and like a Disney movie amazing and beautiful things start happening system wide and the only pandemic we'd have to worry about is the one of smiles. The problem of a satisfactory work environment is that anyone trying to hit the target will soon find that it moves, when you have two parties disagreeing on which moving bull's eye to try to hit you'll likely never hit either, and never both; that is to say, it's taken years for management and labor to come up with solutions that work for both of them and apparently this is still very much a work in progress.

Pride is a funny thing in the context of US. Labor says, "we're given nothing to be proud of", and management says "nobody's taking pride in the job they're already doing". Now who is really right? I consider both of these to be legitimate observations. How many years of pride-less, lackluster work are people willing to give until they feel that the company is making them emotionally fulfilled? How many embarrassing months and years of bottom-of-the-barrel customer service rankings and pathetic news reports will management choose to endure while they wait for their work force to experience a mass epiphany?

Obviously, there's no easy solution. Personally, I think that when considering changes to the operation or kicking around new ideas, management should get heavy and regular workforce advice and input in addition to all of the numbers they crunch. We need buy-in. Before something is rolled out, it should have the stamp of approval both of the people that make the decisions and count the money AND of the people who will be doing the actual work. This is how the seeds of pride of good will are sown; when everyone gets on the same damn page and BOTH parties have to live up to what they said they'd do and HOW they'd do it then it's much more likely to work.

Management and labor are not the problems. The distrust and animosity between them are the problems. Until people are willing to really swallow their pride and get their hands dirty, we can expect to still come here regularly and spin our wheels. The scanners are a perfect example of this. Huge amounts of time and money could have been saved if the ramp had been brought in during the initial configuration and implementation; as far as I know feedback was never even solicited from the ramp, so why should it be a surprise when the stupid things don't work right, need regular software updates to conform to the operation, and are handled carelessly? If our managers and well-respected rampers approached the workforce together with a working model of how scanning should go down, we'd never be stuck with what we have now: a burnt meat loaf too expensive to throw away so we keep trying different spices to make it delicious.

Ponder how many bags get left behind because unmotivated employees don't bother to "Go the extra Mile" anymore because they realize that no one cares about them and they are viewed as liabilities to be disposed of in favor of cheaper new hires.

Again, motivation from where? Should there be 55-gallon drums of Motivation(tm) with candy ladles every three gates and next to the soda machines? I motivate myself. Ain't nobody ever got motivated because some stooge in a collar and khakis thinks up some magic formula or shells out more dough. What's the point in paying more if it's a safe bet your workers will perform only nominally better because they still don't feel valued?

Also getting bags to the right place is not "an extra mile" or any extra measure in standard or metric because in reality it's that person's job, and I think you will agree that if a person is so depressed that he or she cannot fulfill such a simple and important aspect of customer service he or she would be better suited for the analyst's couch than the ramp.

Compare the attitudes of the employee of US and WN, then look at which group makes more and the CASM of their respective airlines and ask yourself how much of that CASM difference is caused by Chicken Sh*t Managers like this person in CLT?

Agreed. Petty instances like this do absolutely nothing to solve the problem. If it's a Mets hat it's probably blue anyway. It's unfortunate that there's no shortage or driftwood managers that swagger aorund doing what they think it is a manager is supposed to do: act managerish. They have no real concept of what makes the ramp work and their most striking disabilities are their lack of being able to think in the abstract and empathize. Simply put, they're idiots. These people should be dismissed and ignored, and it's always fun to make fun of them when they're not around.

If every ramper worked exactly by the company rules, flights would be at a standstill.

This is funny because it's so true. This operation works only because different parts of procedure and policy must be selectively ignored; it's a labor in grace and I think it's funny that we're never given any credit for ignoring the right rules at the right time. I think this is largely true of any bureaucracy, but especially ours. It's a beautiful thing.

You are benefiting off the backs of what the East rampers endured and fought for and you have the audicity to criticize them, and you wonder why the union has solidarity issues, look in the mirror and you will see the answer to that problem

The same East employees that were willing to let the West be damned and gambled and lost at arbitration? But I digress; how many dead horses can we beat at one time?

 

[JoeDirt]

CJ
All I have to say after that is "...." .........OK I got nothing.

 

[JoeDirt]

I had a flight this morning going to PHX. My shift manager was hovering on the gate the whole time but stayed out of my way and let me do my job. We managed to turn the flight in 61 minutes and actually made up some time. Turned 12,000 lbs and left OT. When all was said and done he came up to us and told us "Job well done". That is how a good manager does things.

 

[ChockJockey]

I had a flight this morning going to PHX. My shift manager was hovering on the gate the whole time but stayed out of my way and let me do my job. We managed to turn the flight in 61 minutes and actually made up some time. Turned 12,000 lbs and left OT. When all was said and done he came up to us and told us "Job well done". That is how a good manager does things.

Exactly. The best managers are the ones that have the faith and confidence to let us do the job right.

It's good to hear positive stuff like this. Turning those 321's is no short feat. Getting them out so they hit the ground on time or early makes a big difference to us in PHX. Compared to when I first started I think I've seen definite improvement with our CLT inbounds in terms of on time and how they're loaded. I'm not a TL but I always make sure whatever bin I'm stacking in is done right and I know that PHX by no means has a perfect track record. We all know those 321's can be hell to turn when the inbound is a mess.

Thanks Joe!

 

[28L_or_10R?]

I had a flight this morning going to PHX. My shift manager was hovering on the gate the whole time but stayed out of my way and let me do my job. We managed to turn the flight in 61 minutes and actually made up some time. Turned 12,000 lbs and left OT. When all was said and done he came up to us and told us "Job well done". That is how a good manager does things.

Much unlike the manager at my last station who would stand at military parade rest observing a turn. As the turn was completed he would snap to attention, walk up to a worker and give them an ESON. :blink:

 

[JoeDirt]

I'm sure that if he had chosen to do so he probably could have found something negative and maybe have even written an ESON to someone but having done so would have accomplished nothing.