Block 1 and 4 Message

Unity?

February 8, 2012

To Local Council 7 Members:

On January 20 we wrote to the members of Council 7 a brief outline of our concerns regarding the “leadership” substance and style of the MEC Officers. In it, we questioned their management of your dues money; their ability to lead this group to a new contract containing quantifiable improvements; their inability to create pilot involvement in the contract negotiations process; and their use of their political organization to stifle discussion and criticism.

Well, almost on cue and certainly by way of validating our allegations, there have been motions to recall each of us added to the Council 7 meeting agenda for the February 15 LEC meeting. Additionally, the MEC Chairman and his Secretary/Treasurer have written to the entire membership in an effort to refute our specific criticisms with protestations of creating division and harming unity. Recent motions have been filed at ALPA National by the MEC Chairman’s political henchmen to bring up Article 8 charges against Tony and me. This is an all-out intimidation effort to stop us from communicating freely and openly with you. Rest assured we will not be intimidated.

We agree that unity is the critical element to a successful contract negotiations process. But what is unity? The current leadership talks a lot about unity but they do not understand what real unity is. They apparently think unity is a buzzword to be freely thrown around and, if done often enough, it will become reality. We disagree. You cannot just talk about unity, you have to create it. Airline pilots are highly intelligent individuals who tend to have “type A” personalities. We aren’t motivated by trivial banter, but rather by well-presented and well-defined ideas that we then discuss among each other until we coalesce around a common set of goals. Only then will we be unified. True unity is achieved when the group has intellectually bought in to common goals and purposes and feels those goals are worthy of some level of sacrifice to achieve.

To cultivate true unity, the leadership must define a common purpose around specific negotiating goals and then communicate those goals through specifically targeted communications. We cannot just talk about improving scheduling. We need to focus on what specific goals we must achieve in negotiations. Once those goals are identified, there must be a focused and unrelenting communication strategy to keep the organization on target. This type of leadership involves hard work. It is every day, all-day work. Frankly, we have not seen the work ethic out of our leadership to make this successful. Our pilots deserve better.

We offer two examples:

NPRM/Cargo Cutout—Last year management told our negotiators that they could not negotiate scheduling under the shadow of the NPRM. Instead of using this event as an opportunity to build unity by rallying the troops against this obvious management ploy, the MEC Chairman’s response was to write a letter to the membership (November 13, 2010) in which he said, “ . . . it would not be prudent to negotiate related CBA sections until we can thoroughly review the final changes.” You should note that at least three other ALPA carriers successfully negotiated TAs during the ensuing 12 months. Not only did we give management a pass, but we failed to use management’s refusal to negotiate scheduling issues as an opportunity to build unity through a common purpose.

When the rumors of a possible cargo cutout surfaced and that FedEx management was pushing for the cutout, the response from the MEC leadership was to tell the members that there was “no evidence” that management was lobbying against our interests despite significant evidence to the contrary. They were asleep at the switch and missed an opportunity to unify the members around a common purpose.

Currently there is talk about a lobbying effort to remove the cargo cutout, but that tactic has not worked well for us in the past. What should be done is to tell management that there will be no new contract signed until every provision of the NPRM is met or exceeded, then communicate that position to the membership over and over again until it becomes a forgone conclusion. Let us take ownership of this idea and use it to unify ourselves around a common purpose. Once we take ownership of this common goal we will send the message to management that it is an important issue not to be trifled with.

Retirement—Too often we hear from members that they are concerned management will come after our retirement in the next negotiations. Our view is that retirement is an integral part of our compensation package. It was paid for with pay concessions throughout the 1990s. Giving back retirement would be tantamount to a 30 percent pay cut. There is no way to recoup such a concession.

A perusal of our company’s annual reports for the last several years will point out that retirement has been regularly funded and at the same time our company has remained very profitable. In our view, any concessions in retirement constitute a deal breaker.

In fairness, I have heard the Chairman say that he has no intention to give concessions in our retirement package, but he obviously has not communicated it clearly or often enough because many of our members are still unsure what the MEC’s position is on retirement. Again, the leadership has failed to build consensus around a common purpose.

Remember, the power is in the membership, not the union structure. We must mobilize and empower the membership if we expect to conclude successful negotiations.

The current MEC leadership speaks incessantly in vague and opaque generalities about unity. As we said earlier, unity is not a catchphrase, it is a joining together of the whole around a common purpose. Without intellectual buy-in there can be no true unity. We don’t see that the groundwork has been done to promote intellectual buy-in. This leadership either doesn’t understand what is involved in building the contract from the membership up, or does not possess the work ethic to accomplish that task. Either way, it becomes apparent that new leadership is the only way to fix this pernicious problem.

Your union/your voice,