Originally Posted by Iwa Washi

This bears repeating. I’ve had the same experience and perception. Too many times, it seems that CE (and the SIG for that matter) just doesn’t want to fight every battle that they should, and I’ve never really understood why. Hell, sometimes it feels they are flat out friendly with the company.

Our average grievance count over the past 16 years on the FedEx ALPA website is less than 12 a year with the highest year listed at 19, and I’m convinced our company does something grievance worthy every single day. Over the past few years, I’ve flown with FO’s from American, Delta, and United, and when I asked them how many grievances were filed a year at their former company, every single answer was “hundreds” (plural).

It would appear that our FedEx ALPA Contract Enforcement is not even close to being industry standard – not by a long shot.

Is it that our CE is so underfunded and understaffed that they just can fight them all – i.e. there are 100 battles to fight but we only have the funding and staff for 12, so which ones do we pick? Is it because they are so overwhelmed defending our pilots being disciplined that they don’t have the time to defend the contract? Is that too many of our union people value their interpersonal relationship with their company counterparts over defending our pilots? I sure wish I knew. Maybe someone with more knowledge on this matter can chime in here and educate us on what we are missing.

If it is simply a funding issue then hell, I’d be willing to pay some extra dues if I knew that it was all going straight to Contract Enforcement. $20 a month from 5,000 pilots is $100,000 – every paycheck $200,000. That surely would do some good.