Originally Posted by
slowplay
At the MEC meeting the negotiating committee put up a bunch of slides on our sick leave use and its change over time. I'm working from notes, so I apologize for any errors. Since 2012 sick leave usage is up 30%. The top 20% of sick leave users that don't go on disability use 50% of our sick leave. 5% of our pilots use more than 40 days per year and never go TD or LTD.
They also addressed that demographically our aging pilot group should only use about 1% more, not 30% more. There has been a pilot behavior change. UAL and AMR's sick leave has decreased (no data provided) but both those properties have substantially more punitive sick leave provisions than we do, beginning with only 60 hours of accrual.
They said because of increased costs this is one of management's top priorities.
I hope one of the notepads covers this, as sick leave was just a few slides in a big deck.
And to the slides presented I say "so what?"
I understand they want SL usage to go down. I was on SLOA for Oct-Jan due to a back injury. Would you like to know how many times I was contacted or contacted about transitioning to Disability? ZERO. When I was hired I was briefed, SLOA, then disability. Plus my condition was on that was PROGGED to be remedied sooner....so the lovely folks at Delta started a Sec 15b review.
If they wanted folks to use ST/LT Disability vs SLOA THEY should have pushed it.
There were no sick leave abusers in our last contract. If they used all 100 unverified and 240 total...they were still abiding by the contract - unless they had fraudulent Dr notes - if so BAD on them - but that is the company's fault. Not ours.
This TA sucks. The SLOA is the main deal killer for me. No one can spin this into a good thing.