CAL EWR

[Magenta Line for Wednesday, June 3, 2009

“We got you guys the Rolls-Royce of PBS bidding systems!” - Continental’s President and COO, Jeff Smisek, to Council 170 Secretary-Treasurer Captain Kaye Riggs during his very brief stay on Captain Riggs’s jumpseat, July 6, 2007. Mr. Smisek and his sizable entourage were on their way to Seattle for the rollout of the 787.


Today is Wednesday, June 3, 2009 and there are 10 items for discussion.


Item 1: Don’t Be Givin’ Up Yer Hostages, Matey

A couple of issues back, we alluded to management hostage-taking in lieu of giving us, as your reps, a good spanking. Actually, we did more than allude to it, we gave you specific warning that management would be taking these actions against our pilots. While we have seen a few incidents that veered dangerously close to the line we will not allow management to cross, since the Flu Crew incident was resolved, management has been fairly meek. Then we go and help them out.

Last week, the issue of the “red bracelet” reared its scarlet head and the next thing we knew, we had a Captain’s dispute with his First Officer go directly to the chief pilot’s office, do not pass Pro Standards and no soup for you. Gentlemen—ladies—this, frankly, is not acceptable. Only two things can come of this, neither of them good:

1)The guy that turns the other guy in paints a target on his own back, and,
2)The guy that gets turned in may be the very next, and completely innocent, hostage.

If we bombard the chief pilot offices with our own hostages, it will become difficult to separate the ones we dropped from the ones management shoots down.

Professional Standards exists for one reason: to mediate disputes between pilots without involving management. Management is not our friend and serving up our fellow pilots to them does nothing for anyone—except management.

You got a problem with that? Call Pro Standards.


Item 2: We Have Met the Stone Wall—and It is Them

We usually talk to the guys in the MEC home office a couple of times a week. Makes it easier to coordinate our communications plus we get information that we otherwise might not get because it isn’t necessarily important. In our recent conversations, we picked up on some underlying tension between our leadership and management and that maybe management was a little irritated with all of us these days. Now, why do you think that is?

Could it be that your EWR reps love slipping the ole leather mask in place and chasing management down the road, chainsaw held high? Could it be your EWR reps and your MEC leadership’s weekly exposure of management’s pettiness, avarice, and ineptness has caused things to cool? Maybe it’s the love we feel whenever we peel the cover off another chief pilot doing something really stupid and mean that used to pass without anyone outside the union finding out. Or maybe it’s the daily coordinated attack your EWR reps and the MEC leadership have mounted. No matter, whatever it is, we love it. We love turning these office wonks into guys who now have to look over their shoulders before they do anything to one of our pilots.

This is a shout out to our EWR pilots: We love you guys! We love you helping us turn the heat up by reporting to us all the really dumb stuff management does so that we may focus our efforts upon them.

Now, the short-term results of our hatchet-wielding have been for management to not talk to us. Yes, they took their toys (which will soon be ours) and went home. And while there was a little bit of movement earlier this week on the hotel room upgrade issue, the bulletin from flight operations management is far from satisfactory and they continue to stonewall a solution to this issue that we would accept. They’ve stonewalled any and all solutions to the jumpseat problems, both CASS and cabin, other than alternate access for Continental pilots several months ago, and they’ve stonewalled any number of smaller but nevertheless important issues so they could show us who wears the pants around here.

Note to management: we will remember every cold glance, every unreturned phone call, every unanswered e-mail. We will remember Jackson Martin and his silly game-playing on the hotel issue which has allowed the flight attendants the freedom to openly challenge the authority of the Captains of several of our flights. We will remember Fred Abbott every time we hear of jumpseat denials because an agent was either “too busy” to process the cockpit jumpseat or hadn’t a single clue about the operation of CASS or the alternate clearance procedure. And we will remember every heavy-handed slap meted out to every one of our pilots by every assistant chief pilot.

Our memories are long—and they are expensive.


Item 3: I’m Sorry, Room Service Isn’t Answering

In this week’s installment of the flight attendant hotel room confiscation plan update, we have this: Not much.

Although we were advised that a new memo from flight ops management was freshly interred on the e-bulletin board (aka the CCS Pilot Bulletin Leper Colony), what we unearthed after some laborious digging was far from buried treasured. This woefully inadequate memo still leaves in question the proper order of room assignments, fails to disavow the current erroneous bulletin circulating among the flight attendants, and leaves gaping holes for abuse by flight attendants who have a “special” relationship with the layover hotel.

Since flight operations management is sulking in the corner and won’t concern itself with any flight operations management stuff, how are all those planes getting anywhere? Oh, that’s right, the pilots of Continental Airlines continue to do their jobs day in and day out acting as flight planners, dispatch, crew trackers, ground service coordinators, ramp supervisors, catering problem-solvers—and, oh yeah, pilots, and all this so we can be dumped on by the flight attendants when we get to the layover hotel.

So, anyway, we have a new bulletin—and they’ve got the old one, turning crusty with age there in the Inflight manual, still out there circulating through the hands of every one of our flight attendants. Meanwhile, flight operations management is still hiding under their desks high above Smith Street, afraid to cross the only employee group who was never cowed by management into accepting a career-stopping contract. And we sit and scratch our heads wondering why we cannot get management to generate a bulletin without the weaseling, back-peddling, language tricks, and kow-towing.

In some ways we can certainly understand why flight ops management has taken a powder on this: standing up for the men and women who work for you is hard, especially when you don’t have to deal with them face-to-face every day. True, it’s somewhat easier for them when they have a couple of useless dead-weight low-level managers whose sole contribution to Continental Airlines was helping deliver Contract ’02 to their new masters down on Smith Street, but, all in all, it ain’t nuclear physics; it’s leadership. And there ain’t any leadership anywhere in flight operations management.

Leadership means looking after the guys who are the reason you have a job in the first place, leadership is the willingness to make yourself unpopular in the face of opposition from other departments—including Inflight—and leadership means you don’t hide behind your lackeys and have them do the dirty work. Leadership is looking at the supervisors of the other employee groups and saying, “These are my guys, they are the most valuable employees on the property, and they will not be taking a back seat to any of your guys. When your guys learn to fly and have invested the blood, sweat, and tears my guys have, get back to me. In the mean time, take your ‘memo’ and stick it in somebody else’s inbox.”

Instead, we have a guy who sits in a chair in an office on Smith Street. The sign on the door says, “Vice-President of Flight Operations”. We’re not sure what’s hanging in his office closet—because every other department head is wearing the pants around here.