Attendance Reliability Program
April 27, 2013Dear Fellow United Pilots:
"They beat up on employees, fight with unions, remove anything unessential (like food) invent ways to create charges (like checked bags or ticket change fees), fiddle with fuel costs, ignore customers and constantly try to engineer minute enhancements to operations in efforts to save pennies."
Forbes 4-11-2013
That is your obligation as a union member.
The main takeaway from this is that management seems not to care what is written on paper, and they will do what they want. They believe that they can make examples of a few pilots to whip the rest of the United Pilots into line. One answer to this problem is to grieve the violations – which may be the corporate strategy, as a limited number of grievances can be heard per year. Management may think they can make us waste our time recapturing everything we have already won at previous System Boards of Adjustment. But what the Company is ignoring is the fact that this history issue was discussed in Section 6 negotiations, and the parties mutually agreed that past practice would continue to apply unless the language in the UPA significantly differs from the prior UAL CBA, upon which the UPA was based.
In the meantime the Company continues to violate the contract exactly as Frank Lorenzo did in the 1980s, just to tie us up in court.
An example of the new United Management philosophy is the “Working Together” guidelines. These guidelines are nothing more than a one-way street for management’s operational convenience. Using the Guidelines, management can break the rules all day long and get away with it, but if you are not the perfect child (yes, they consider you a child), then they will hold you accountable. Management even forced you to sign your allegiance to the “Working Together” guidelines just to get through Phase 6 training. If you refused to agree with it, the result was an NQ placed in your schedule and a loss of pay. You saw another instance of this philosophy if you recently attempted to book pass travel. If you did not acknowledge the Company Guidelines, you could not book pass travel. The UAL-MEC Grievance Committee has put the Company on notice of our objection to the Guidelines and will vigorously pursue this topic.
Why would the Company do this? They do it to intimidate you and eventually use it against you in disciplinary proceedings by telling an arbitrator that you willingly agreed with unilateral changes to the negotiated conditions of your Contract. The Company has made individual pilot lists of statistical operational performance. They intend to harass those pilots who are exercising their Captains’ Authority. This is management by testosterone and statistics and is, sadly, what this company is currently all about. Flight Operations management wants you to meet their definition of job performance through statistics or you will be sent to a re-education camp called ECRM, often in spite of the Guidelines.
The Company has unilaterally changed the conditions of our employment with their newly announced Attendance and Reliability Program. The LECs have recently put out some information on our objections to the new ARP. While the Company tried to sell this as a wonderfully flexible way for the Chief Pilots to deal humanely with attendance issues, we are seeing this program used as another punitive tool in the hands of managers intent on punishing sick pilots.
This ill-conceived program allows a manager to subjectively determine if you should be disciplined – up to and including termination – for just missing one trip, especially if it is on the wrong day or causes the wrong flight to cancel. Even worse, Labor Relations and the System Chief Pilots have created penalties for the legitimate use of sick leave. The Company unilaterally announced that as few as one and no more than five instances of appropriate sick leave use will trigger “Corrective Steps/Progressive Discipline.” This is a clear violation of our contract and well established, mutually understood past practice.
As the Company violates your contract, please contact your local grievance representative and give them your detailed information. This is especially true if you areaccused of being in violation of the Attendance Program.
Some triggers are:
·Self-induced fatigue – not a sick call
·Short notice sick call – where the pilot does not realize that he cannot fly until shortly before he has to report
·Sick call after receiving an assignment – pilot becomes ill after a reserve assignment or field standby
·FMLA – anytime an FMLA-approved absence is counted as an occurrence
·Military leave – anytime an approved ML is counted as an occurrence
Stay vigilant and document any incident that draws attention. If you have a flight that cancels, keep a detailed record of why. The only way the Company succeeds in their attack by numbers is if you don’t have the information to fight the statistic.
Sadly, the Company fails to recognize that this is not the way to manage employees. The Daily Finance stated the reality best last week:
United simply cannot be the "world's leading airline" unless it makes a massive effort to get on the same page with employees, improves its internal processes, and regains its place as the top-ranked network carrier in the AQR survey.
The UAL-MEC will evaluate its additional options at its quarterly MEC meeting next week in Herndon, Va. In the meantime, we hope that management re-evaluates its strategy going forward.
We are United,
Captain Jay Heppner
Chairman, United Master Executive Council
Here's something you can get behind and maybe achieve some unity. If pierce has sent out anything similar to the cal guys please post his words of wisdom to show unity at the MEC level.