Negotiations Session 10

Your AFA Negotiations Committee met with management for Negotiation Session 10 on August 13-15. Representing you at the table were Committee Members- Heather Coleman & Lexie Massey, MEC President- Lisa Davis-Warren, AFA Staff Attorney & Negotiator- Kimberley Chaput.

The Committee met with Vice President Station Ops & Inflight- Shelly Parker, Manager Inflight Labor & Performance- William Casalins Altamar, Managing Director, People and Labor Relations- Chéri Ruger, Financial Analyst- Mark Schuck, Senior Corporate Counsel, Alaska Legal- Latrice Lee, and Seyfarth Shaw LLP Partner, Labor & Employment- Molly Gabel.  Director Crew Support- Mick Niemann also joined as a subject matter expert.

Much like the last session, we made very little progress.  We discussed Article 6 (Crew Scheduling) and Article 7 (Reserve). On the positive side, management has withdrawn its proposal to terminate the SAP settlement. We had some good discussions about improving SAP, including allowing Flight Attendants to trade transition trips and increasing the amount of Open Time reserved to seed SAP. Those were both AFA proposals; management agreed if they could add additional blackout days. We left off with AFA proposing that all blackout days also be paid holidays. We are awaiting management’s response.

Beyond that, though, management is not interested in AFA’s proposals. In their view, all of them would be expensive and they do not want to put money into anything but wages. Make no mistake, wages are important—our premium pay, PBP, 401k, etc. all go up as wages go up. There are two problems here, however. First, our contract is more than our wage scale. We want and need flexibility in our schedules in order to have even some semblance of a personal life. Secondly, management has not made a wage proposal. We have no idea if they will propose a big increase or a small one. We cannot make any decisions based on a promise to “make it up in the wages.”

Our discussions on Reserve were just as fruitless. Management said it would agree to our proposal to eliminate extended reserve (ER), provided that they could change a reserve’s RAP on any day of the block. That’s arguably worse than potentially sitting ER twice a month, and of course we could not agree to that.

Further, management wants reserves to be assigned an initial duty period of 14 hours. Under the current contract, the maximum initial duty period is 12 hours. When we asked why they needed 14 hours, they said that if they deadhead a SEA reserve to ANC to work an ANC-FAI turn, the reserve must then be overnighted in ANC since a deadhead back to SEA would make the duty period 12:05. They could not name a single other scenario where they needed 14 hours. In short, they want us to change one of the foundations of our contract to make a single trip more efficient (for them). One would think that the obvious solution would be to place more reserves in ANC, but that’s not what management wants to do. And no matter what we say at the bargaining table, we can absolutely expect them to put together more trips that would exceed 12 hours if they had the right to do so. This, of course could happen after the reserve had already sat 12 hours on home reserve, or even 36 if they were on ER. That is clearly unacceptable. We did not respond to Article 7, as we would have rejected all of management’s proposals (like they rejected ours). We are adding Reserve to our list of deadlocked sections.

Management should be responding to Article 6 at our next session. They also owe us a response on Article 9 (Sick Leave), which AFA last passed them in May. We will see what happens, but we advise that no one gets their hopes up.

As you can see, things are starting to come to a head. AFA will be preparing a comprehensive proposal, covering the entire contract. Doing so will force management to give us a wage proposal. While we don’t expect their first offer to be their last or best offer, we will at least know how much of a fight we’re in for.

We will update you again after our next session, which will be September 17-19. Until then, Wear Your AFA Pin, and remember that we are Stronger Together, Better Together!