I haven't heard if the TWU committee voted to bring this to the membership. Hasn't this been the usual practice? If so, considering the impending elections, the membership should know how their reps voted. Also, there are "no guns pointed at the heads" of the negotiator as they claimed in 03'. Let's not get'em next time, let's get'em NOW.
I voted against it.
Here's some of the reasons why;
-We didnt even offer a counter offer like Stores, they ended up getting a skill premium that they never had before.
-this deal makes very little progress towards restoring our 2003 contract, depending on where you are, what shift you work and what title group you are in everyone is different. OH A&P gets hit the hardest, their real wage will decrease by around 9% from 2008 to 2013 with an end loaded contract, all the increases coming in the last three years of the five year deal. OSMs who get license pay are pretty much the only ones who see some progress. Line maint gets brought back to 2006 pay levels if they start between 2000 and 0400 (the shorter window will allow the company to eliminate MRT by changing the start times, presently there is no way they can have 24 hour coverage and not pay MRT), otherwise we end up back slightly below 2008 levels, only now we, like everyone else, would no longer have bridge insurance and be subject to the other concessions.
-We continue have less than industry standard Holidays and Holiday pay, when you factor in the two Holidays and .5 less pay its adds up to around $2500/year less in Holiday pay (lowers our Total Value by around $1/hr)
-The change from automatically off to automatically on for Holidays removes any incentive, and any contractually based arguement from the union, to get more people off on the Holidays. In the past we would look at the schedule and get the company to give more people off.
-We continue to have less than industry standard for Vacation, After 5 years we have three less days than pretty much everyone else ($-800, take another subtract another 38 cents from the hourly wage)
-We have the least amount of IOD , 600 hours is common, we get 80, which forces us to burn sick time, time that we now need to pay for Bridge insurance.
-We accumulate 30% less sick time than industry norm but the company wants to charge us at least 45% more for the coverage. The company admits that on average 5 days of sick time is used per employee, that means that on average we can only save 3 days per year, so it would take 50 years to accumulate enough sick time to pay for retiree medical (3days x 8hrs=24/yr, 20hrs/month x 60 months=1200hrs, 1200/24=50 years) So you would have to start on payroll at age 10 to retire at 60 to have enough sick bank to cover you, on average. (19 years of perfect attendance)
-No increase in shift differentials. If you work shifts, regardless of location or title group, you should collect a premium for that, .01, and .02 is not enough.
-The term is too long, 5 years with only a 6% increase is nuts. We should never ever sign a contract longer than 2 years onless its front end loaded with very good increases. We know that if the company locks themselves into a long term deal they can get out of it by simply running up debt and saying they are going to file BK unless we agree to open it, we saw that with the 2001 contract, we also know that if we sign a lousy deal and the company has a windfall they will not open the dealk and we will have to eat it, we saw that in 1995. So deals longer than two years are bad for us. The company likes long term deals for both of the above examples plus the fact they get better terms on credit. Its been claimed that we had to go to a five year deal because otherwise the company could not get any credit, however they have had open contracts now for the past several years and have aquired billions in credit.
-Permanent probation for Crew Chiefs, I'm against this, we have enough problems with management pressuring Crew Chiefs into violating company proceedures and FARs in order to make on time departures, we dont need to give management more leverage.
There are more but its turned out to be a nice day and I'm heading out.
{Cmon Bubba , run that car with no oil. You can save some money on it, who cares if it burns up the engine 20 miles down the road. It made out of the trailer park didnt it.}
