Fellow Atlas Crew Members,

I am happy to announce to you that today the union received the arbitrator’s decision (award) on grievance 2017-030. Grievance 2017-030 deals with the company’s illegal subcontracting of passenger flying. I am happy to report to you that the arbitrator ruled in favor of the union and, as the union had requested, ordered that the company immediately cease and desist from engaging in such illegal activity. We are heartened that the arbitrator upheld the grievance in its entirety and that he fully agreed with the union’s remedy to correct this career threatening violation of our CBA. This award marks another landmark day and the union’s second consecutive CBA arbitration win in the fight against Atlas management. This might explain why the company continues to stall and delay on many other union grievances and arbitrations currently on the calendar.

This award means that going forward the company may not under any circumstance subcontract any passenger flying. If they want to do passenger subcontracting, management must do one thing that this management group has shown no willingness to do – that is to negotiate. In the meantime, protecting customers will require the company to have a spare aircraft available.

Let’s review a brief history of this grievance, which dates back to a filing on May 15, 2017. In 2010 the company had tried to insert subcontracted flying in the current CBA, but because it argued for an amalgamated Atlas/Polar CBA, that provision was denied when the arbitrator issued his interest arbitration award in 2011. You see, neither the Atlas CBA nor the Polar CBA contained provisions for passenger flying. Thus, partially by its own underhanded scheme to amalgamate, the company was thwarted from achieving a passenger flying provision. After the current CBA went into effect, Atlas then intentionally subcontracted passenger flying in defiance of our CBA. Then, just like it did in the strike language case (CBA Section 26.X), management tried to get through arbitration what is was unable to get in negotiations or even in the arbitrator-imposed Section 1 of the current CBA. The result was the same in both arbitrations, a loss for the company. The arbitrator slammed the door in the face of this underhanded and illegal attempt to rewrite our CBA and steal a provision that the company could not obtain even through the interest arbitration that it so badly wanted. It is both a sad and pitiful conclusion that the company likely spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to dupe an arbitrator into giving it something that it had not secured through negotiations or even interest arbitration. That money could have been better spent in almost any other way than simply lining the company’s high priced lawyers’ pockets. In fact, it could have partially paid for a new CBA with one of its most important resources – the pilots.