What actually happened was our min hour guarantee got reduced to 64 hours in exchange for getting your job back Jim. The union had a grevience on the SBS system not working properly as per the contract and we wanted to keep our higher min guarantee until the company fixed it. Our MEC chairman at the time, in a last minute deal agreed to drop the grevience in exchange to rehire you
That has got to be THE most assinine thing I've ever read on FI.
If what you are saying were true-that the union gave up hundreds of credit-hours spread over 500 members to save ONE job-it would have been grounds for de-certifying the union. Even if ALPA wre not de-certified, it would almost certainly have led to a recall of your MEC officers and a lawsuit to hold in abeyance the LOA that created the change.
Whatever your personal feelings about the individuals involved, neither ALPA, KF (contract administrator) or DB (MEC Chairman) were that stupid.
(I think there were a couple of other items also)
Yea, a couple of minor, insignificant little things, like implementation of a flight pay loss bank, changes to bid line guarantee, and installation of an entirely new crew management system. It's all spelled out in
"Looking Back and Moving Forward" issue #4, which I have before me.
I won't quote the entire document, as it is 8 pages long and of no interest to anybody now. But there is one paragraph that pretty well sums up what was going on, and what brought about the reduction to 64 hours. In the words of DB, the MEC chairman;
"Regardless, the heat was on and the Company wanted relief from the 78-hour guarantees, hence, the decision to go live with Mercury [Crew Management System], call it operational, and reduce the guarantee to 64-hours.
This was going to happen whether we liked it or not. It simply came down to appealling to the company that, while we understood their desire to reduce the guarantee, they were considerably less than honorable in their approach. At this point, time was also a huge factor. The whole situation required that a decision be made within a three-day period. In short, we did have a window of opportunity during which time we could salvage something in return for the lowered guarantee, or we could choose to take a "wait and see what happens" attitude
and end up with nothing but a questionable grievance [regarding bid line guarantee]. So the MEC made the decision to go ahead with LOA #13"
There it is. The company wanted 64 hours and were willing to implement a known-faulty CMS to get it. The union knew they wouldn't win the arbitration so they didn't fight it and went for other things instead. Settling open grievances may have been one of those things (there are usually quite a few open at any given time)
but they played no part in the MEC's decision to accept the 64 hour guarantee.
I'd be happy to forward a copy of this to you, but I don't think you'd read it. You're like my neighbor the religous fanatic - you've held to a particular version of a story for so long that you now fear that to question or change it in any way would make you seem an idiot. So you don't, and thus, remain one.
