united airlines alpa pilots are looking like fools now
""" A Message From the Master Chairman, Captain Wendy Morse
From CNN to Fortune Magazine to the Stanford University Business School, United’s new management team has been very busy touting the progress they are making in integrating United and Continental. The business press has been fawning, accepting company statements at face value. The following statements are two points that the company has been pitching:
“… I'm a big believer in culture, especially in a service business, and what we're creating is a culture based on what I like to say are the two things my mommy taught me: Treat other people like you'd like to be treated, and never tell a lie.”
“If you have a workforce that enjoys each other, they trust each other, they trust management, they're proud of where they work -- then they're going to deliver a good product. You can lecture and train, but unless they really believe in who they work for and are proud of who they work for, and trust each other and trust management, you won't get that. …”
Unfortunately the reality is very different at the negotiating table, where company negotiators continue to take far too long in turning around proposals on the different sections of the contract, and the proposals they do eventually pass across the table continue to contain further work-rule concessions from United’s bankruptcy contract. It takes the company weeks or months to counter proposals. Sometimes the excuse is unforeseen absences of one or two company personnel and other times they claim costing proposals takes time. When one considers that the original goal for the entire Joint Collective Bargaining Agreement (JCBA) process was only eight weeks in duration, any excuse is simply unacceptable.
Yet again inconsistent with the goal of getting to an agreement, the company was unable to meet with our negotiators this week, so CAL-MEC Chairman Jay Pierce and I met with the Joint Negotiating Committee in Houston to evaluate the state of the most recent proposals for the scheduling sections passed by the company last week. The sections of the contract passed by the company last week are: 5, Hours of Service; 8, Filling of Vacancies; 20, Allocation, Assignment and Scheduling of Flying; and 22, International Agreement. The JNC has spent 10 weeks deliberating and exchanging proposals with the company on these sections alone, and only one section is anywhere near the framework of reaching agreement.
When the Transition and Process Agreement was signed last July, ALPA and the company committed to a “smooth and seamless” movement towards a single pilot contract by the merger closing date, now seven months past! Granted, there were unforeseen delays in the fall of 2010, but we have been negotiating in earnest now since the beginning of 2011, and we are only incrementally closer to a completed JCBA.
Why is the company being so recalcitrant? It may bespeak a certain level of timidity on the part of senior management that causes concern for their ability to compete in the global marketplace with competition such as Emirates and the other Asian and Middle-Eastern government-supported tigers. It would be nice if this was not the case, and there would be no better way to prove this than by coming to an agreement with ALPA. In the meantime they are utterly failing to appreciate the poisonous and deeply corrosive atmosphere they are fostering amongst the employees of the new United Airlines by allowing negotiations to drag out this long."""