Originally Posted by
whalesurfer
Outsider looking in.. Why did your company decide to change the sick call rules? Did you have an exorbitant amount of sick calls all of a sudden?
I find it worrisome because our managers here at brown always look for ways to copy other airlines' procedures IF it suits them.
We typically get a "is everything ok" call from one of our instantaneous super-captains after 6 sick calls in a year.. I've never heard of anyone having to submit a doctor's note but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen, I just never heard of it..
I hope your union succeeds in reversing this rule and that our company never adopts it.. Good luck!
Sorry for butting in.
UPS pilots are always welcome on our threads. What affects one pilot group can easily affect another.
I'll give you a rundown on what happened a couple of years ago, and where this all stemmed from. I think the settlement's entire goal is to stop the dreaded "advisory letters" from the new tracking system that management implemented.
A couple of months before peak, was it 3 years ago, maybe, they implemented a new sick tracking system without giving the pilots any notice or information about it. Now many (seemingly random) things triggered a high points value, and at a specific number, they required a letter from your doctor. Okay. But you know how they notified, at least some people? By company email. Brilliant. Who reads their company email when they're sick? And we were getting multiple emails daily about the new iPads, so if you didn't read your email daily, the request for a doctors note could easily get buried.
Instead of calling people or putting in a VIPS notification, the first thing they did is FedEx a bunch of very nasty advisory letters to people's front door. It chastised them for not sending in the requested doctor's letter, and gave themselves permission to discipline you for further incidents. Some genius really thought that people were ignoring requests for letters (like, who actually does that?).
Some of the pilots who got letters hadn't called in sick for years. Some of the people sent the requested doctors letters when they actually knew they were wanted, with evidence of serious issues, and the letters were not retracted. I don't know if the company got the intended result or not (people being afraid to call in sick during peak). But I do know that they managed to **** off people who are normally gung ho, anything for the company types.
This is a pilot group that does not react well to being threatened. But give us good coffee, free popcorn, sleep rooms and positive feedback, and we'll do anything.