Originally Posted by
Brad Mahoney
As most of you on this forum, I am embarrassed at the efforts represented by the tentative agreement that has been foisted on us. The TA that our union has sheepishly dropped in our laps fails in so many ways that they won't even try to justify it.
Our union leadership has said that they are not going to sell this TA. That's an excuse. The truth is - they have sent us a TA that they are too embarrassed to endorse. Not only that, but they have done this at a time when our company is making fantastic profits for their shareholders, the FedEx stock price continues its incessant climb and our company is spending billions of dollars replacing our entire fleet with brand-new airplanes.
Can anyone tell me why we should be required to give them work rules concessions, give them our retirement and pay much more in health care costs just so that they can put more money in their shareholder’s pockets? I feel you would have to be a fool to not fight this.
There are three jobs that a union has; protecting our safety, negotiating benefits and pay, and providing leadership for our pilot group. Our union has failed on all three counts.
SAFETY
During the 2006 negotiation, our negotiators made a specific point of putting important FARs into our contract. The idea was to make sure that we were not exposed to any stupid changes made by the FAA. We did this because of the propensity of our pilot group to be flip-flopped in their circadian rhythms far more than passenger fliers. Fatigue is cumulative. If you combine getting routinely flip-flopped with flying much longer duty times when you are flying day legs, how much worse will it be? Giving the company the change in 8 in 24 is categorically contrary to our goal of safety and will undoubtedly increase fatigue.
Not only do they fail on safety with this change on 8 in 24, but I don't think they're being honest with themselves about the effects of this change. When explaining this apparently small change, the union presented this fairytale:
v The revision allows the conversion of 24 hour layovers (West Coast and Caribbean destinations) into 12 hour layovers for day duties and 36 hour layovers for night duties.
Let me get this right - they will take the day and nighttime 24 hour layovers, change the day trip into a 12 hour layover and the night trip into a 36 hour layover? Even though there will be absolutely no contractual or FAA requirement to give a 36 hour layover to the night fliers, we are supposed to believe that the optimizer won’t rearrange system form but will magically gift those 12 hours taken from the day fliers to the pilots who are flying those destinations at night? Whoever wrote this doesn't understand the power of a cold-hearted CPU. The optimizer will make those 12 hours disappear faster than your retirement.
Let me get this other thing right - The changes written in the contract have absolutely no geographic restriction on them, so they can apply anywhere in the system, but the company is only going to use them on the West Coast and Caribbean destinations. That's a load of BS. The optimizer is going to make use of this rule throughout the system and it's going to work us much harder.
Let me see if I've got one last thing right - our negotiating committee, which is made up entirely of SIG guys (the guys who are supposed to know everything about scheduling), signed off on presenting this fairytale as part of the explanation of our negotiation. If they heard this explanation from the company during negotiations and passed it on to us, they are woefully short of the skepticism necessary to be effective negotiators - as well as lacking the skills to effectively evaluate contract language. Their grasp of what the changes mean seems dangerously narrow and naïve.
A second safety failure is allowing the company to use the sick bank sell-back as an enticement to vote for this pathetic TA. The vast majority of our pilots reach the end of their career without much in their DSA bank, so it’s not that much value. Putting this in the contract did nothing more than provide an economic teaser to get pilots to vote for this TA. The people who are going to suffer this change are those of us sentenced to flying with pilots who fly sick. We already had plenty of incentive for people to fly sick and to make up sick time. I know that many pilots like the idea of getting this money, but adding more wood to this fire is a minor economic teaser that is a safety failure.
BENEFITS AND PAY
The stagnation of our retirement is the biggest giveaway in this TA, and the most unnecessary. To allow our retirement to stagnate and decline to inflation is simple cowardice. We have to fight for it, and we have to fight for it now or it will never be recovered. We should've been asked by our leadership to engage in picketing, demonstrations and a strike if necessary to defend our retirement. Instead, they have sheepishly put the onus on us to make their decisions for them. Wow.
I'll be straight with you; the 2006 contract did us no favors in maintaining our retirement. Captains Webb, Chimenti and Stratton (Chairman, Negotiator and R&I) thought that they were negotiating a new way to index the retirement that assisted the company in reducing their costs of covering our retirement. Bad idea. Unfortunately, they didn't change the number that was important, the cap. That was a strategic failure of a high order and we are suffering that now. We have to fight to change it.
The situation was not helped when we foolishly accepted a two-year extension of that contract a few years ago with no substantive changes. There was no reason that we shouldn't have kept negotiating, and we further weakened our position by allowing more years between meaningful negotiations.
Many people think that our older pilots are going to be the big losers in this scenario. That's not true. The biggest losers are going to be our youngest pilots. This pathetic TA adds only 2% to the B fund. To replace what's getting taken away from our A fund, it would require about a 10% increase. And that's only if IRS rules didn't limit B fund contributions. There is no way for a young pilot right now in this TA to even come close to the retirement value of a pilot who retires this year. Someone starting with the company this year will have their A fund so completely degraded after 25 years of work that it will be negligible. And the only portion of the retirement that will have any effect will be a meager B fund.
That's not a legacy I'm willing to hand down. We should not be giving up a cornerstone of quality employment with our company making as much money as it is. If our company can afford to buy an entire brand-new fleet of airplanes, they can afford our retirement.
I have seen some pilots who are resigned to losing their retirement say that they will just have to start working more so that they can invest more. I say that if you're willing to work more, that work should go towards volunteering in the union enough to make your damn retirement right! Rewarding the company by working more for them when they are out to screw you is one of the most ridiculous things I can think of. I want to stand up and fight and hand down a legacy of strength. If other pilot groups can do it, there’s absolutely no reason we can’t, with the exception of will. Which brings me to…
LEADERSHIP
Do you want to know how good our leadership is? Put yourself in the shoes of any pilot looking from the outside at this airline. The airline is making huge money. The airline is replacing its entire fleet with new airplanes. The airline hasn't lost a dime in 20 years. And the union for this airline comes out with a concessionary contract that gives up a huge chunk of our retirement, tightens our work rules, gives mediocre bonuses and no one in the union can endorse. If you were from another airline you'd be sad as hell for us. You'd be incredulous at the ineffectiveness of our negotiating. You'd be wondering why we don't have the stomach for a fight.
There's one reason we've got that problem here; a complete and total lack of leadership.
Almost every person that I've seen on this forum who is voting yes seems apologetic (or close to it) in their explanation of why. There is nobody that I've seen that is excited over this contract. And we all know why. It's crap.
A lot of the people who are voting yes talk about being uncomfortable with what might happen if we vote it down. And it's because the leadership, in their convenient silence, is giving absolutely no hope or direction to someone who might want to vote this tentative agreement down. It's a subtle yet effective tactic to discourage those who would vote it down. If you have no hope that your leaders will take you confidently into an uncertain future, you’re far more likely to accept what's offered to you.
Our negotiating committee demonstrated on a number of occasions that they did not have the backbone to say no at the negotiating table. It's obvious from all the givebacks that are present in the TA, but the most perfect example was the PBS debacle. Everyone in the union, from top to bottom, knew that there wasn't a single pilot on the property that wanted PBS. When the company pushed PBS across the table, instead of telling them where to shove it, the negotiating committee and officers came to the pilots, like the lion to Oz, to give them the courage to say no at the table. The timidity we saw from them then foretold the quality of the negotiation. When we saw that timidity, we should've replaced them then.
If you don't have leaders that with their own spines have the fortitude to say no at the table, you haven't got a chance. I saw this back in 2012 when I resigned as vice chairman because I couldn't stomach being associated with such weakness. What I said in my resignation letter, which is still available on this forum for you to read, was: “This team is hopelessly company friendly. If what I am writing doesn't make you sit up and take notice, you have a good chance of waking up one day to a tentative agreement that looks like FedEx Labor Relations wrote it.”
We are living that future.
But we should have been protected from it. We should have been protected by the officers who were newly elected. Unfortunately, they instead have led us into this current TA debacle and have proven themselves incapable of hardball negotiations. Many people are going to say that it wasn't their work and that they shouldn't be held accountable for the failures of the negotiating committee and the previous administration. There is some truth to that, but there is far too much that has been completely in their control regarding this TA that they have fumbled for them to be considered retainable.
It was not Scott Stratton who sent this insulting TA to us, it was our current officers. It was this set of officers that did not have enough backbone to tell the negotiating committee “go back and get something better - we'll wait.” It was this set of officers that chose not to engage the pilots in further demonstrations rather than accept a woefully inadequate TA, in spite of the incredible showing we made at the picketing event in Memphis. It was this set of officers that led the MEC to vote for this TA and saddle their own pilots with the job of negotiating via TA votes. It is these officers that have failed in the most basic test of all: if you can't endorse a tentative agreement, don’t send it to the pilots.
Finally, their convenient silence on this TA is deafening.
WHAT TO DO
We have been in this position before. We turned down a tentative agreement in 1997 when we had absolutely no protections for our jobs and had no contract. We were an incredibly fractured group, about half purple and half silver, many anti-union and many pro-union, and yet we still voted down a lousy contract.
The reason it was voted down was because pilots voted based on the merits of the TA, not because everybody was worried about how different groups of pilots would react or how uncertain the future was. When you vote on this contract, vote on whether or not you think it's a good contract. If you are voting out of concern over an uncertain future, consider this; which is better - an uncertain future or a lousy contract cast in stone?
There's more to consider about voting down this TA. Voting this down tells the company that we are deserving of better. It tells our union leadership the exact same thing. It tells everyone outside of this company the same thing. If we vote this down, I feel that UPS will have a stronger position for their negotiations, not being hamstrung by negotiating against the concessionary provisions in our TA. If they see us demanding better, they'll understand that they are worth more. It bolsters the entire cargo sector. Will it be easy? Hell, no. Will it be fast? Hell, no. Will it be worth it? Yes. We need to stand strong with our cargo brothers and support each other. We should not accept this bad deal.
Vote this TA down, and then remove every person who had a hand in sending this document to us. Those people have proven themselves inadequate for hardball leadership. We then need to find people who can fight and put them in the union. I don't care where the fighters come from. They can come from the Stratton administration, they can come from the Webb administration, they can come from FPA, they can come from anywhere.
We need to assemble those fighters in the union and then stop talking about them with labels so that we can actually fight as a unified force for a contract that we can be proud of. Until we stop talking about each other with all of the stupid labels we’re going to do nothing but kneecap ourselves and our future.
We have voted down a bad tentative agreement before and gotten improvements. It takes everyone to collectively grow a spine and act as a single force.
Fight, damn it! Don't let this TA be your legacy.
Brad Mahoney
MD-11 Captain