Item 4: Management Treats Our Service Men and Women With the Usual Dignity & Respect
We received the following from our Council 170 Military Liaison, Brian Boeding. After years of abuse and disrespect, our military service men and women have decided to fight a new enemy: management.
Because we have a “retained management rights” clause in our contract, management is not limited in their ability to do anything they wish to do if it is not contractually prohibited. While the CALMEC has in the past worked through our Military Liaison Committee to try to help fix these problems, the violations as alleged in the lawsuit filing are USERRA violations and not violations of our collective bargaining agreement. As a result, there was and is very little we, as a union, could do to force management from the path that has led to this lawsuit. We hope management enjoys the fruits of it’s arrogance.
On July 2nd, 2009 a class action lawsuit was filed against Continental Airlines in the San Diego District Court. The suit claims Continental has been violating the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA) and the class consists of Continental pilots who serve in the uniformed services' guard and reserve. After nearly 5 years of constant harassment by Continental management our pilots who serve our country have been forced to use the federal courts in an attempt to end the discrimination.
Military pilots have little to no control over the needs of the Department of Defense, with military duty often occurring on weekends and over holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries. Our deployments can range from two weeks to several years with some of the accommodations making the worst layover hotel look good. The reality of belonging to the reserve component of uniformed services today is that we are used more than ever before and given the budget constraints facing the DoD this will not change anytime in the foreseeable future.
Sending letters and emails of complaint have not had the desired effect of improving the anti-military culture here at Continental, and in fact the harassment from some of the Chief Pilot Offices has even gotten worse. Treating the law the same way they treat our Collective Bargaining Agreement, CAL Flight Ops management arrogantly walks all over the USERRA statute as if they are untouchable.
Sadly, Continental may end up spending millions of dollars defending the illegal actions of 12 of its Chief Pilots and Flight Ops Managers instead of coming to the table to discuss what kind of reasonable solution could be found because, unfortunately, "Working Together" has become a hollow mantra these days. The military pilots are not asking for special treatment. We are asking to be allowed to serve our great nation and fly our schedules here at Continental without feeling one or both of our careers are in danger because our Commanding Officer dumped a set of orders in our laps for next week. We are not asking the company to pay us while we are away, although some very patriotic companies do. We are only asking that they pay us the retirement benefits the law says we are entitled to. And finally we are asking the company to stop trying to push the problems with their staffing model off on the Department of Defense through us.
Brian Boeding
LEC 170 Military Liaison
bboeding @hotmail.com
Item 5: Don’t Touch That Phone!
This is a reprint of an item we ran a couple of weeks ago. As we move further into our best staffed summer ever and the junior manning calls increase exponentially, please remember that you do not have to be available for junior manning. Management does not own us if for no other reason than that they haven’t fully paid for us. Oh, and they just sent out 308 furlough notices, too.
Summer memories from our childhoods—running through the sprinklers, no school, the start of fall classes lying far ahead in the misty future. Times of laziness and fun, summer camp, trips to Disney World with mom and dad.
Summer realities from our servitude with Continental Airlines—junior manning in the wrong seat, being double pumped on reserve, being told after having days off rolled that the 24 hours you spent in Caracas six day ago was your “24 hour break” and that you’re now good for another six.
We work for managers without morality. This means that we mean nothing to them other than as a warm butt to fill a required seat. This means that the 147 hostages we have on furlough who could be helping with our chronic understaffing are, instead, sitting around doing nothing—nothing save trying to figure out how to keep from losing their homes and how to keep their families fed and clothed.
All of us are familiar with the call from scheduling offering the latest junior manning “opportunity”. But are all of us familiar with this?: There is no requirement for any of us to be junior manned. That’s right, no requirement. When you are off, you do not need to answer any call from scheduling. It is your choice, and we firmly believe you may consider the effect it has on our furloughees. If you do not want to be junior manned, get a second line, a distinctive ring for scheduling, or caller I.D. and avoid their clutches.
Failure to properly plan on management’s part does not constitute an emergency on our part. We are not indentured servants, we are professional pilots and expect to be treated as such.
Item 6: It May Waive—But You Don’t Have to Salute It
We’ve got a real problem. It keeps us understaffed, it keeps our hostages on the street, it keeps us in the wrong seat or the wrong aircraft or the wrong base, and it transforms our vacations and our days off from the anticipation and enjoyment of our leisure to merely the countdown to our next group of work days.
This problem is the hours we waive when we bid every month. Every hour we waive for line construction is one more hour we have to work—and one less hour we can spend with our families. Every hour we waive is one less hour that would be available to help return one of our furloughees to us. Every hour we waive is one more hour that will be used against us by management when they create their erroneous staffing formulas. And every hour we waive is one more hour management can point to to prove that the pilots will save the airline for one more month.
The Negotiating Committee, in close coordination with the Scheduling Committee, is working to address this problem in our next contract. This is one of the many reasons we ask you to provide them your full support.
Item 7: Mr. Kellner’s Pay Calculator
Mr. Kellner’s pay calculator is being retired. While Mr. Kellner still has some months to work, his pay calculator does not. The final tally is likely incalculable anyway given all the methods at the disposal of our executives to hide, defer, renegotiate, and collect special bonuses for their “service” to our company.
Mr. Kellner took millions from Continental and will continue to take millions in the future in the form of deferred compensation schemes of all kinds. He and his family will still be able to use their positive-space first-class passes to bump us off our completely full flights as we try to get to work or go on vacation.
Mr. Kellner’s pay will go on long after anybody remembers his name or what he did, if anything, to ensure the success of Continental Airlines. Those of us here today—our younger pilots—in the future may be pulled aside by their new First Officers who will point to the nose of an aircraft parked at one of our gates. The question will be, “Who is Larry Kellner?” The response will most likely be, “Oh, he was just some guy who was CEO way back.”