mainlineAF

You can be flown into a DFP. The only difference is if you get extended into a DFP they have to give you 24 hours off on your next trip. If your trip goes back into base after 24 hours they can put you back onto it. If it doesn’t fly through base you go into RO.

aa73

Im not so sure I am in agreement with this AIP any more...too many red flags popping up.

Arado 234

A Bad Decision Averted……for a Week



The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Regarding the Current Settlement Agreement

Your MIA representatives have taken opposing views of this agreement with the Chairman voicing his unequivocal support for it while I have expressed my extreme misgivings that other than LOS this agreement does not produce any positive outcomes for our members. An objective view of the settlement is almost impossible due to the “spin” campaign President Carey has constructed in an effort to “sell” this agreement to the membership, even going as far as to heckle a Board member in open session at the meeting who opposed the agreement in a completely unprofessional manner.
After hours of debate and deliberation the “warts” with this hastily prepared agreement began to expose themselves and a large fraction of the BOD began expressing doubts regarding its approval. In order to keep it alive before it reached the floor for a vote (and most likely failed), the supporters of the agreement, mainly the ORD and MIA Chairmen and the ORD and DFW Vice-Chairmen, wisely pushed it off for a more thorough analysis and delayed its vote for another week.
Here is what lies in store for the membership if this agreement is passed from my point of view according to the notes I took during this debate and the Optimizer test run briefs given to the BOD last August.
First the “Good”:
Now for the possible “Bad”:
- The new Duty Rigs have been sold to the membership as a huge gain and “industry leading”. Unbelievable valuations have been attached to them by President Carey, possibly in an attempt to “sell” this agreement to the membership despite its obvious flaws. The truth is that in their present form, although they will greatly reduce the number of unproductive slash-trip sequences the Optimizer creates, the Duty Rigs will probably do little to improve our QOWL, and a lot to destroy it. (Remember that wide body sequences do NOT get “Optimized”). The bottom line is that Delta Duty rigs in the hands of American Airline’s management, will not necessarily result in Delta-like schedules and even Delta admits it wants to change some parts of their Duty Rigs! (Delta’s more pilot friendly management does not use an Optimizer). The fact is there has been VERY LITTLE IN-DEPTH ANALYSIS of these duty rigs by APA, merely an Optimizer test run, from which our Miami scheduling folks were intentionally prohibited from attending despite my protests. This test produced only ONE WEEK’s worth of schedule. There simply isn’t enough data to make accurate predictions about how the new Duty Rigs will affect us once the Optimizer is allowed to use and abuse us. Despite the cursory glance, some advocates, such as our MIA Chairman Billy Ray Read and APA President Dan Carey, are die-hard advocates of the new Duty Rigs. I believe that the new Rigs have promise, but as negotiated in their present form represent a truly bad deal for most of the membership, especially the generally more junior narrow-body pilots. Here’s why:

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  • Over 55% of the total narrow-body flying hours (over 40 % of the sequences) will be 4 and 5-day trips (Remember the A300 does not fly 5-day trips so 4 is the longest that can be scheduled). This contrasts to today’s schedule on the 737 in which some months contain just a few percent of 5-day trips or as little as NO 5-day trips. The majority of our narrow-body flying will be shifted to longer trips. This might seem to be a good thing to some at first glance, but please read on:
    
  • Most of these longer sequences will NOT be commutable on the front end, the back end or both ends. This portends badly for the almost 50% of our pilots that are commuters. They usually bid longer trips to minimize their wasted time in traveling to and from the airport. Many more of them will now have to purchase hotel rooms or rent crash pads to fly these longer trips.
    
  • The longer narrow-body trips will be constructed at the expense of the shorter trips, primarily the 3-day slash trips. Approximately 80% of these trips will be absorbed into the longer 5-day trips. Many of the turns and two-day trips will also be absorbed into the slash trips to minimize the company’s cost in paying the average calendar day. This portends poorly for the pilots who live locally or just prefer shorter trips since they will have less of them to choose from. It was entirely misleading to use the MIA-SEA-MIA 3-day slash trip as an example of how the Duty Rigs pay since there will probably be little to none of these sequences produced once the Optimizer runs these new Duty Rigs.
    
  • The longer trips are sometimes front-end loaded with flying and thus in greater risk of falling apart. This will leave our pilots, especially our narrow body pilots, at greater risk of being put into HUGE recovery obligation periods with sometimes more than 25 hours on the line, thus becoming glorified “reserve pilots” even though they may hold a line. The MIA Chairman erroneously stated that this Recovery Obligation can be unilaterally denied by a pilot. It cannot. By the JCBA it must be “mutually agreed to”, a liberty that Crew Scheduling RARELY if ever allows.
    
  • There is no real timeframe for enacting the new Duty Rigs and in fact the company is threatening to delay their implementation if we don’t float or use as PVDs for at least 30% of our total vacation. If the company DOESN’T implement the rigs by January 2019, the document stipulates a “penalty” of $1 million for the first month and then $1.5 million for every month thereafter (providing that we don’t change something to the rigs in the meantime in which case they may not have to pay the penalty at all). Please step back from this provision for a second and use some back-of-the-napkin math to figure out just how onerous this “penalty” ISN’T for the company. President Carey has stated we will need upwards of 170 more pilots to fly the schedule with the new Duty Rigs and is basing his estimates of the millions of dollars in value he is gaining for the membership on this number. However, if the company doesn’t hire the additional 170+ pilots at their present value of between $200,000 to $300,000 per pilot (aprox. $2.8 to $4.25 million per month) how can a $1.5 million a month be an adequate penalty? This ridiculous “penalty” speaks volumes about our Chief negotiator’s inability to include real incentives into the agreement and looks suspiciously like the open-ended implementation schedules, rife with loopholes, that make up the JCBA language. It seems we haven’t learned from our mistakes. There is a possibility the company WON’T hire the additional pilots and just figure out how to work the rest of the pilots harder. Either way it will come down to a financial decision for the company, as all decisions are for AA, and there is a good chance of not getting the rigs implemented at all before our next Section VI. It should be obvious by the preceding discussion that the rigs, as negotiated by APA in present form, are not yet ready for prime time and need to be further fleshed out.
    

Now for the “Ugly”:
The Crew Scheduling playbook known as the “Current Process for Filling of Open Time” and included in this agreement is a horrendous step backwards for our QOWL and only the “tip of the iceberg” of the liberties that CS will take from us if we sign this agreement. We are also obligated to release the company from “any and all claims, damages, or liability related to the “Filling of Open Time Dispute”” including the “use of the current process for filling of open time”. Exactly what does this mean?

•  
  • This means the numerous open grievances against the company for the last 3 years of scheduling abuses will be paid at 50 cents on the dollar and will go away forever. So much for the “penalty” of having violated our contract in the first place! So much for ensuring there are sufficient penalties in place to prevent them from doing it again! So much for the efficacy of the grievance process! So much for the fact that these grievances probably only represent the small fraction of times Crew Scheduling was CAUGHT; they probably ACTUALLY violated the rules many more times than this and got away with it! Thus, the company is getting off at much less than 50 cents on the dollar for these violations!! This is an EXTREMELY poor precedent to set and will only encourage further Crew Scheduling abuses by Mr. Jewett and his band of merry schedulers in the future.
    
  • The Presidential grievances that attempt to collect repeated violations of the same contractual provisions into the umbrella of a “Presidential Grievance” and expedite their decision on a “cite and precedent” basis will be “withdrawn with prejudice” until some future time with no decisions being made or penalties being paid. We will not be able to grieve these violations again. However, we may be able to pull the original grievances out for hearing at some future date if talks completely break down. In the meantime, we are in “limbo” regarding these contractual violations. Really? Remember that these grievances relate to Crew Scheduling’s repeated abuse of over 14 contractual provisions, sometimes going back over 4 years, and affect a wide variety of contractual abuses such as our pay protection for being bypassed, advanced notification of 30-hour rest breaks, failure to contact us for proffering trips, assigning make-up flying, proffering sequences IAW with 15L. and many more violations. These grievances are ESSENTIAL in preserving our QOWL. They are essential in protecting the contractual protections we put in place in the JCBA. Their value to our contract cannot be put in dollar terms. They are effectively being “given” back to the company as a gift for LOS and questionable Duty Rigs!
    
  • We will no longer be able to get pilots paid for the Crew Scheduling errors in the assignment of open time flying process (unless they violate whatever new rules the company establishes as the “current process”), and the company gets to unilaterally write this new “playbook” when they benchmark what the current processes are. Thus, the hundreds of savvy pilots we are getting paid each year for noticing the CS errors in the assignment of open time flying will be drastically if not completely eliminated. We will now have to catch them violating their own “playbook”, if we can even figure out what that playbook is………
    
  • The company and APA can’t even agree to the meaning of “current process”. As if the document that Crew Scheduling provided as its current play book is not bad enough, Crew Scheduling will meet with APA to tell us exactly what is meant by “current process”, benchmark whatever “wet dream” they concoct, and thus define the “current process” we will have to play by in the future. APA won’t even have the ability to refute the company’s claim that whatever Crew Scheduling invents as their “current process” is really NOT the current process. It will effectively allow them to go beyond the abuses that are already occurring. In my opinion this is a flat-out capitulation which allows the company to make ALL the rules. Good luck in grieving an abuse since the resulting process won’t even be in the JCBA! This is certainly worse than the original process we “agreed to” in bankruptcy!
    
  • Your ability to grieve contractual abuses by Crew Scheduling related to 4C., 15L. and 15J. (most of the scheduling grievances that have been filed and the subject matter contained in the Crew Scheduling playbook) will be suspended until DOTC/RAS is implemented (that means until we agree on electronic “push” notification and whatever order of assignment process and callback times the company defines as current process). You might be able to grieve the fact that Crew Scheduling isn’t following their own playbook, however your ability to do this successfully would be in question since there IS no contract violation if there is NO CONTRACT to grieve in the first place. However, rest assured there is an interim process put in place. Vice President Hamel can file a grievance on your behalf if he considers an issue of “sufficient importance” to warrant a grievance regarding the agreement he helped devise. Let's invent a new term and call it a "Vice-Presidential Grievance". However, the issue will be heard by a single arbitrator whose decision will be binding. So much for the contractual protections given in Sections 21, 22 and 23. How often do you think THAT expensive process will happen? But never fear! You will still be able to grieve whatever portions of the contract the “current process for the filling of open time” does NOT affect IAW the JCBA Sections 21, 22, and 23!
    
  • The “Current Process for the Filling of Open Time” document which we were provided with as an appendix to the agreement the President and Negotiator Duma want us to approve, is not in contractual language, rife with contractual violations, not negotiated with “notes” to determine what the “intent” of vague provisions are, and not going to be included in the contract per this agreement. It is being portrayed as a temporary process, but in the absence of an agreement regarding the implementation of DOTC/RAS IAW with Mr. Jewett’s wishes, will be the ONLY scheduling playbook we have, possibly until the end of our next Section VI negotiations. I have already explained how this document doesn’t even fully describe the current process for the filling of open time and that Crew Scheduling will be able to dictate this process to us as they “clarify and explain” what this really means. I counted over a dozen violations on page one of this 7-page document alone!! How bad will it get when Crew Scheduling reveals to us how they REALLY schedule us and make that the “benchmark” process for our scheduling until we can agree on a new process? Of course, this doesn’t seem to matter to our MIA Chairman, who never went through Contract Compliance Training, never served as a Contract Compliance Officer, and has demonstrated only a vague knowledge of the contract in his year as our Chairman. To him the contract sometimes seems like an inconvenience.
    

It is the duty of this union to “protect the individual and collective rights of the members”, and essential to that right is the right to settle individual and collective grievances, yet this agreement abrogates a large portion of our ability to do this through the grievance process, sells back grievances essential to the quality of work life of our members for practically nothing, and suspends our ability to utilize our grievance process for a large portion of our contract.
It is the duty of this union to “continue to improve the rates of compensation, benefits, pension, HOURS OF EMPLOYMENT AND WORKING CONDITIONS [emphasis added]” of the members yet this agreement improves the rates of pay for some at the expense of the hours of employment and working conditions of the vast majority.
I hope that I have explained to you in sufficient detail just why I can’t support this agreement. The political theater that has surrounded this debate on C&R, the MIA Chairman’s Base Blast, the picketing of APA Headquarters by the LOS crowd, the countless phone calls, emails and text Blasts that I and many of the BOD members in opposition to this agreement have received regarding this issue, some of them verbally abusive, hasn’t helped in facilitating a truly objective debate.
The fact that an ambitious President, a “green” Chief negotiator and a Navy JAG legal counsel even allowed this agreement to reach the floor in the first place, given its inherently divisive nature which plays one part of our membership off against the other, does not portend well for us as Section VI looms over the horizon. The fact that many of our hard-working SME’s and committee members at APA labored over the holidays to get “into the weeds” on these issues at a personal sacrifice to themselves and their families, also concluded that this was truly a bad agreement, and were not allowed to speak-out or provide their input to the debate does not portend well for the leadership we have in place at APA and where we are heading.
Sincerely,
Ed Sicher
MIA Vice

PRS Guitars

I’m with you, I think these guys are using the 5 day thing as a debating point. ACD is an improvement, and it’s silly not to concede that. With that said the other concerns are valid, but when they use these other debating tactics they lose some credibility in my eyes.

Route66

HA HA HA! HAPPY NEW YEAR! Tail wags the dog.....as usual.

jcountry

Damn...

Would someone please let base reps know what’s TLDR means?!?!

(I bet not 3 people at this airline read all that bloviation.)

Someone really needs to tell these fellers about brevity being the soul of wit. Missed that memo.

Name User

I stopped after he wrote A300 instead of A320. If they don't know what airplanes we fly how can they know how to interpret a complicated contract?

Al Czervik

A good “soup to nuts” from DFW:

DFW UPDATE

4 January 2018



Negotiations Update

It has been a few weeks since my last message in which I tried to lay out in complete detail precisely what the issues were that created such a stir over the holiday. Click here to review that message.

The short version is that the company accidentally created a problem that they then tried to solve using mechanisms outside our contract. Our fight was to defend our contract and compel compliance. We achieved that immediate goal – the premium pay arrangement was not what I would like our contract to eventually look like, but it was compliant with our existing contract where possible and variations from our contract were mutually agreed to (which is how events like this are SUPPOSED to be resolved).

But as Paul Harvey used to say, here is “the rest of the story……”



Length of Service (LOS)

Thousands of our pilots had their careers destroyed or severely damaged by the economic fallout of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. These pilots had either left the military or resigned from other flying jobs in response to American’s recruitment efforts, or were caught up in the effects of a merger that came at just the wrong moment in history. Many of these pilots spent more than a decade on furlough, and many returned to probation pay, and most are still suffering the economic impact. We were able to obtain a 2-year LOS adjustment in 2014 that, along with the general pay rate increases achieved in the JCBA, provided some relief, but more remains to be done.

Now that the company has put the economic uncertainty of the bankruptcy/merger behind them, it is time to finish the job. This management team has spent $11 billion buying back stock over the last 2 years, is spending a fortune to build a brand new Headquarters Office complex, and even gave outgoing executives multi-million dollar packages when they jumped ship to become our competitors.

We stepped up and helped cover the holiday schedule after management’s screw up – what better way to say “thank you” than by rewarding the loyalty of these junior pilots who endured the hardships and still returned to make this a better company?

Duty Rigs

It has been 30 years since our duty rigs were changed to base “G-time” on a minimum and average number of hours “per duty period”. That duty rig allows very inefficient scheduling (pilots on the road for 3 days for barely more than 10 hours of pay in some cases), which in turn has led to increasing numbers of fatigue calls (pilots can only work 20 day months – often involving all night flying – for so long before the human body demands a rest). The fatigue calls result in disruption to flight schedules and increases manning costs. In other words, WE want a change to improve our quality of life, AND the economics make a change attractive to management as well.

The APA Scheduling and Negotiating Committees have been working for more than a year to identify the best solution and have been in discussions that seemed headed toward a mutually beneficial change to basing “G-time” on the number of Calendar Days in a sequence, not the number of “duty periods” in a sequence. It made sense for both sides; all that was left was to iron out the specifics.



So, what’s the hold-up?

Rather than conclude these mutually beneficial talks to improve our out-of-date duty rigs in a collaborative manner, and instead of simply saying “thanks for stepping up over the holidays” by solving the LOS issue once and for all, we were disappointed last week to discover that management has decided to hold these issues hostage.

Here is the ultimate irony – we started this fight in an attempt to enforce compliance with our contract, but management’s demand in exchange for LOS and Duty Rig improvements is:

· That we settle a large number of individual grievances at a discount,

· That we withdraw (with no right to refile) roughly a dozen Presidential Grievances over systemic contract violations,

· That we forever waive our rights to claims arising from those grievances (in effecting, allowing the violations we were protesting to continue with no ability to continue protesting), AND

· That we allow the company to impose use their “current scheduling practices” without challenging whether those “practices” are compliant with our contract.

The full details are on the bottom of this message if you want to read them, but the bottom line is that we started out defending our premium pay provisions and could end up giving up contractual protections in our scheduling and sequence protection sections instead.

So, what’s next?

I said this was ironic, didn’t I?

APA has spent the last year restructuring our legal department, hiring 5 new staff attorneys, nearly doubling the size of our Contract Administrator staff, and purchasing and installing tracking software to better organize our processing of grievances. Some have pointed to the slow pace of grievance resolution, but it’s hard to run at full throttle while doing an engine overhaul. Even so, is the slow pace of the legal system a valid reason to simply accept “what the company is doing” and move on? This restructuring has taken time, but as our new lawyers come up to speed, our ability to actually pursue these grievances will spool up quickly. Perhaps THAT is why the company is tying these popular items (LOS and Calendar Day) to the demand that we drop our grievances and quit filing new ones. Do we really want to teach management that all they have to do is overload our grievance system and we will eventually just let them do it their way after all? That, to me, seems to be a path we will regret very quickly.

This week, the Board gave the package back to the Negotiating Committee to do some additional work. We will continue to try to get to an acceptable package.

If management refuses to do the right thing on LOS and the mutually beneficial thing over Calendar Day unless we give them what they want in return, the question will boil down to a judgment call as to whether the value of what we stand to gain is worth the price that is being demanded of us?

But why should we even be facing this choice? In his message sent a month ago, President Cary quoted Hemingway by saying that the only way to determine whether a man is trustworthy is to trust him. We were told that LOS and Calendar Day would follow if we would help AA cover the holiday schedule. We did our part – but now that we have done so, management has tied fulfilling their part of the bargain to significant additional demands not initially disclosed. Who acted in a trustworthy manner, and who did not?





DFW Domicile Chairman





Details, details, details (for those who want more – you deserve all the facts)

Here are a couple of key sections of the proposed “Global Settlement.” Pay close attention to what the words actually say:



DOTC/RAS (Filling of Open Time): In exchange for LOS credit and Rig improvements, paragraphs 1 and 2, herein, APA agrees that the Company shall have the right to utilize the Company’s Current Process for Filling of Open Time until the programming and implementation of DOTC/RAS is completed. APA hereby releases the Company from any and all claims, damages, or liability related to the “Filling of Open Time Dispute,” including, without limitation, the use of the current process for filling of open time and alleged failure to fully implement DOTC/RAS.

Active Presidential Grievances regarding Sections 4.C, 15.L and 15.J are hereby withdrawn with prejudice*, a list of which is appended hereto as Attachment 4.

APA, by and on behalf of all pilots, hereby waives and agrees to forever forgo, any and all claims included in the Filling Open Time Dispute, including claims that have been raised, or could have been raised, in the grievances listed on Attachments 4 and 5, except that nothing in this Agreement prevents future grievances or claims related to the filling of open time after implementation of DOTC/RAS.

Note: withdrawing “with prejudice” means withdrawing with no right to re-file at a later date.

Here is a list from the spreadsheet (referenced above as Attachment 5) of presidential grievances of the subjects, and of the contract sections affected should we agree to this demand.

a. Grievance 14-019 - Pick-up provisions and monthly DFPs. The Company has failed to implement four sub-paragraphs namely § 15.L.4.b, c, d, and f; failed to program and implement § 15.D.3.q. so that DFPs run from midnight to midnight and there are a minimum of ten (10) calendar days off. 15.L.4

b. Grievance 15-043 - Improperly bypassing pilots for OG or Premium Sequences on the grounds that the pilot needed a 30 in 168 rest break. The Company is not calculating the pilots’ rest periods properly. 15.L.8

c. Grievance 16-001 - Assigning Long Call reserve pilots flying on the day following a DFP on which the pilot performed voluntary flying without the required twelve hours notice. 15.J.1, 15.J.2

d. Grievance 16-056 - Improperly notifying reserve pilots of 30 hour required rest breaks 15.J.1, 15.J.2

e. Grievance 16-061 - For failing to contact pilots to offer a sequence because they are on a trip. 15.L.4.c.1

f. Grievance 16-163 - Bypassing certain pilots in make-up, denying pilots pay, and awarding make-up flying out of seniority order. Crew Scheduling refuses to contact pilots in make-up if the pilot is on a trip or on a rest period (even though the pilot has requested contact while in a rest period) then assigns the flying to other junior pilots. 15.L.4

g. Grievance 16-168 - Improperly assigning replacement flying. 4.C (talk about a catch-all - we could potentially no longer be able to grieve "improperly assigned replacement flying" – whatever the company may claim that to mean in the future)

h. Grievance 17-088 - Improperly bypassing pilots for OG or Premium Sequences on the grounds that the pilot needed a 30 in 168 rest break. The Company is not calculating the pilots’ rest periods properly 15.L.4, 15.J.8.a, 15.C.4, 15.I

i. Grievance 17-114 - Improperly requiring pilots into replacement flying obligations to recover pay for trips when not required by Section 4 C. 4.C.7.b, 4.C.7.c

j. Grievance 17-115 - Assigning replacement flying that is beyond one (1) hour of the cancelled sequence value 4.C.6.a.1

k. Grievance 17-146 - Unilaterally implementing a corporate policy governing crew scheduling, imposes non-negotiated obligations/terms upon the pilots vis-à-vis scheduling sequences and causes pilots to lose sequences that they are otherwise contractually entitled to receive. 15.L.4, 15.L.8

These grievances would be withdrawn and nobody affected by these grievances would be paid anything at all. Pilots who are affected in the future by these violations will likely have no recourse.

In addition, the crew schedule "current practices" we would agree to accept include these provisions that violate the current contract:

a. Assigning the highest time open trips to RO pilots without attempting to match either the number of hours "owed" or the footprint of the original sequence
b. Assigning RO flying even if that RO flying conflicts with duty free periods, including duty free periods that cannot be moved into the future (i.e. involuntarily erasing a DFP when there is no place to move it to)
c. Assigning RO flying that exceeds the monthly max or IMAX (a jobs issue)
d. Accepting the company's refusal to implement out-of-base pick up in the opposite division (i.e. preventing pilots in an international bid status from using out of base pick up to access an open domestic sequence)
e. Allowing crew schedule to ignore the “inverse assign” language and simply resort to reassignment “with the first person they contact from the list of all pilots qualified for the sequence at base.”

All of these changes will result in some pilots being forced to fly sequences which they were not obligated to fly under the contract, and other pilots desiring to pick-up being denied access to those trips because the trips got forced onto someone else. No estimate has been given as to the economic value of these changes.

Management is demanding that we waive our right to file new grievances over the issues in the lists above, and they would be able to use their unilaterally written (and contractually non-compliant) scheduling practices “until the programming of DOTC/RAS is completed as agreed to and implemented.”

If the company’s past performance on programming and implementation is any guide, they would likely be able to use their contractually non-compliant “scheduling practices” for a very long time. We technically could file grievances over the company’s failure to follow these practices, but since the agreement lets them define what those practices are, it would be VERY difficult to win.

Remember that all of the work rules we love to complain about got into our contract during some past negotiation where we focused on the pay rates and not the rest of the contract. Management loves to dangle things we REALLY want, but tie them to things we would normally never consider accepting. Do not let management whipsaw your emotions with false deadlines and “take it or leave it” ultimatums. This emotional rollercoaster is just a warm-up for the real negotiations that are coming. The path to success is rarely a straight line.

viper548

Keep in mind these domicile reps are not likely to benefit much from LOS or ACD. I don't think any of the reps would get LOS. I doubt any of them fly the slash 3 day trips that pay 11-12 hours. They only stand to lose from this agreement as it is likely that there will be some changes to the schedules. Keep in mind these guys are against virtual basing because it would take away some of their flying from the large bases. The junior pilot is not well represented by APA.

Laker24

He draped a pirate flag over his microphone and apparently shouted down other members trying to speak. Sounds like a clown show. When 2020 rolls around the company is going to show up with the best lawyers in the business and we are going to have grown men carrying around pirate flags. Doesn't bode well for our next contract.