Company Intent Revealed
CitationAir Pilots To Be Slowly Eliminated And Replaced With Non-Company Flight Crews!
CitationAir Pilots To Be Slowly Eliminated And Replaced With Non-Company Flight Crews!
On Monday afternoon, April 9, 2012, your negotiating team traveled to White Plains, NY to prepare for our third bargaining session of the year. This was the first face-to-face meeting of the parties following February’s stalemate brought about by management’s refusal to adopt industry standard furlough and recall Letter of Agreement (LOA), and their unilateral implementation of a sub-standard voluntary separation program. In spite of this disappointment, your negotiators arrived open minded and acutely focused on moving forward with the issues and contract sections where common ground might be found.
The parties met Tuesday morning, April 10th, at Company headquarters in Greenwich, CT. IBT International Representative Capt. Rick Dubinsky quickly requested a briefing from CitationAir CEO Bill Schultz that would better explain the full intent of the Company’s new business model and the product lines he unveiled during a business update webinar for pilots on March 23rd.
Mr. Shultz provided your negotiating team with a shortened version of his March 23rd webinar presentation. He stated the Company’s business plans were still in the development phase, but he expected to have them firmed up and announced by early May for a rollout shortly thereafter. He emphasized that going forward, the entire focus of the Company’s business model will be to help sell Cessna’s products and services. Through a follow-up Q&A session, your representatives were able to obtain additional specifics. Unfortunately, most of what we heard was quite disturbing with respect to the career prospects of each and every CitationAir pilot.
In essence, management plans on having three primary lines of business as the Company exits the fractional market. Two of these programs—Jet Cards/charter and managed aircraft—are already familiar to us, although they will be somewhat different in the future. The third program, which is new, is currently being referred to as the “Owner Network.”
Under the new business model, Cessna’s existing or future aircraft owners would be offered the option of having CitationAir manage their planes, including providing flight crews, or they could choose to manage their own aircraft, be responsible for selecting and hiring flight crews and place the aircraft in the “Owner Network.”
Ultimately, it appears the vast majority—if not all—of CitationAir’s future flight operations will be conducted using either managed aircraft or aircraft from the “Owner Network.” If fully implemented as planned by management, this would be good news for potential Cessna aircraft sales and services; good news for Cessna’s customers and their employees; good news for CitationAir’s executives and administrative personnel, who are working very hard to keep their own jobs; but VERY BAD NEWS for CitationAir pilots, who would see their job and career opportunities at this Company severely constrained, eliminated or outsourced to third-party crews flying aircraft in the “Owner Network.”
Mr. Schultz stated that only those CitationAir pilots who have been recommended by management and selected by individual managed aircraft owners would have jobs in that particular program. Aircraft owners would have the final say about how many and which pilots are assigned to their individual aircraft. Selected pilots would be expected to uproot their families and move to the vicinity of where the aircraft are based, which would be at locations selected by the owners, not the Company. Continued assignment, and presumably employment, would be subject to how well the pilots get along with the owner, his/her family and associates. When a managed aircraft owner is not using the aircraft, it could be used by CitationAir to fly Jet Card and charter customers with the CitationAir pilots selected to “live” with an owner’s aircraft doing the flying. The havoc such a program would wreak on the integrity of any seniority system should be obvious.
Aircraft in the “Owner Network” would be flown by pilots who are NOT CitationAir employees, according to Mr. Schultz. The owners would hire, fire and pay for their own flight crews as they see fit. He stated the Company planned on offering training for these crews to meet Part 135 standards, so these aircraft and outside crews could be put on CitationAir’s operating certificate and fly CitationAir trips. If this program comes to pass as designed, it would be nothing more than a stark-naked transfer of OUR work to non-seniority list pilots.
Your negotiating team responded pointedly and directly to Mr. Schultz and the other CitationAir, Cessna and Textron representatives at the negotiating table. Capt. Dubinsky stated the Union recognized the need for the Company to change its business model in order to survive and become profitable in the ever-changing private jet transportation marketplace. It is a fundamental truth that a profitable company enhances the prospect of good jobs. Capt. Dubinsky also made it clear that CitationAir’s survival has no real value to the pilots on the seniority list, including furloughed pilots, if management transfers OUR flying to third-party flight crews. He emphasized, in very specific terms, that there are certain lines in the sand that the Union will not cross, nor sit back and allow the Company to cross. Blatant job outsourcing, such as management envisions, is one of those lines.
After that exchange, management’s negotiators were asked if they had any counter-proposals to the many contract sections that are in their “court” awaiting their response. Only one of these outstanding sections—Section 13-Crew Bases—may have to be tabled for the time being, since it deals with an operational issue that may be directly affected by the new managed aircraft program. All of the other sections awaiting management’s response consist primarily of “boiler plate,” industry standard language and concepts that are found in virtually all pilot contracts pursuant to the Railway Labor Act (RLA). Your Negotiating Committee reiterated that responses from the Company were past due.
----End part one, to be continued------
