Latest email from the Union P2P and Family Awareness Committee
Dear Omni Pilots,
Last Friday, Omni sent another message to our pilot group. After writing that it didn't want to get into a “war of words,” it wrote over 1,300 of them with the clear intention of trying to cast a dim light upon our negotiators.
Your P2P Committee is not worried about a war of words. That war is winnable when the facts are presented, and the company's efforts here only serve as a feeble attempt to divide and conquer our UNIFIED GROUP. Worse, while the company is waging a losing battle of persuasion, it’s wasting everyone’s time. The company has chosen to spend the past six weeks leafleting and lobbying individual members of the pilot group, instead of bargaining effectively with our volunteer negotiators.
How did we get here? Because ownership refused to continue to bargain over how it pays you. Instead, it made a self-serving ultimatum, walked away from the bargaining table, warned that it might file for mediation and then did exactly that. Before filing, the Company described mediation as “tedious mediated bargaining stretching over several years.” During this time, the company will continue to reap high margins from our substandard work conditions. More money for them at your expense. The next time you are sitting in economy class, give this some thought.
Omni ending direct negotiations and filing for mediation doesn’t make for a very good story. And since Omni has walked away from bargaining with our elected representatives, we get letters to individual pilots containing management spin. The letters highlight the good, exaggerate the mediocre, and completely omit the bad. At the moment, the letters are friendly, but they’ll start to play on your fears if you do not capitulate.
Of course, the spin only tells part of the story, and we cannot forget with whom we are dealing. For one example, during bargaining earlier this summer, the company took the stance that it would not purchase transportation for a pilot who qualified for a leave of absence on a trip. Thus, if you learned that your spouse was dying during a layover in Shannon, the company would strand you in Ireland and force you to pay for your own way home. The negotiating committee could think of no other airline that treated its pilots so poorly and told management as much. As a concession, the company proposed that it would purchase an airline ticket home if, for example, your wife died; but still refused to provide travel while she was in the process of dying. The company was generous enough to book travel for you to pay respects to your wife’s corpse, but not so generous to pay for you to get home to comfort your wife while she was grievously ill. It took four months of bargaining to reach a compromise on this issue, which in its current form is less than what most companies do as a matter of course. Just another unfortunate example of Omni maximizing their net profits at your expense.
That didn’t make the company’s letter – it doesn’t fit the narrative. But it does remind us of some of the motives behind the letter. And even the items that DID make the company’s letter have stories behind them that you’ll be very interested in hearing.
Over the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing more stories with you concerning negotiations and where Omni stands in the industry. Not propaganda designed to depress labor costs. Just the facts. We want you to be a fully informed pilot group that knows its rights.
Fraternally,
P2P Committee
Family Awareness Committee