May 6, 2012
The Following Update comes from
President and General Chairman Rich Delaney:
Negotiations between District 141 and United Airlines resumed
this past week in Chicago. Our full negotiating team met with
company representatives and restated our position that we believe
all external obstacles to our negotiations¬¬—representation
elections especially—have been removed, and both sides should
focus on reaching an acceptable agreement.
This was our first full week session with the company team since
the departure of Tom Sullivan as chief spokesman for United. We
presented proposals on several articles of our contract and the
company brought additional issues to the table.
We are encouraged by the new pace of these talks and both side’s
willingness to have full discussions on the issues. We are also
encouraged by the fact that by the end of the week we had reached
understandings on a few portions of our agreement and can move
forward to other topics.
While we are not near a full completion of the negotiations at
this point, the limited progress we made in the past week was a
welcome change from past sessions. There is still a lot of work
to be done as we push for an end to these negotiations. The two
sides in these talks have different ideas of what a contract
should look like and we need to work through those problem areas.
But this week indicated that we can find answers that both sides
can accept.
We will return to the bargaining table next week to address
issues unique to our Storekeeper members so that these proposals
can be closed and we can focus on the common issues of wage
improvement, job security for all, and benefit improvement.
United executives: Disrupting
ninety-two person’s lives by outsourcing their jobs is, “not
expected to cause a loss of employment.” Really?
It seems that no week can pass without some disruptive
announcement being made affecting our membership. This week was
no different.
United informed employees in five legacy Continental Airlines
cargo facilities that they intended to turn the cargo operation
over to a vendor and reduce the IAM represented employees.
The stations impacted are ORD, BOS, SFO, DFW, and PHL.
Immediately after receiving notification from the company of this
action, we responded and called for a meeting with the company to
determine the reason for the contracting out and to discuss the
protection of the ninety-two affected members. Preliminary
conversations have already taken place and will continue next
week.
The company has stated this action is not expected to cause a
loss of employment.
This ill-advised decision by the company is an example of why
District 141 chose to negotiate for our combined membership of
both United and Continental rather than wait to address the job
security weaknesses of the existing Teamster contract for
Continental members.
The company was very clear in previous discussions of the
contracting out provision of the Teamster agreement that they
viewed it as the most important language in the contract and
would not voluntarily change it or suspend it before a full
contract was agreed to.
The fact that we are in formal negotiations to reach a fully
integrated contract gives us the opportunity to amend this
language, and other job security provisions affecting all
members, before future company decisions start reducing our
membership.
Discussions between District 141 and United continued this past
week regarding the issue of redeployment of aircraft between the
two airlines and the resulting schedule changes.
While management seeks to
jumble the fleet,
we want understandable separation of work
Our purpose in these discussions is to establish a recognizable
separation of work between the two operations that will define
the work of each classification.
Our approach to this issue is to find an understandable
separation of work that does not cause the reduction of our
membership.
The ongoing issue with United over work centers around the
extended use of vendors to perform work in stations our members
are available for work, and rightly should be performing it.
We recognize a decision must be made on the issue of separation
quickly as significant scheduled changes are planned over the
course of the next several months.
An additional concern of District 141 is the status of FLL and
other similar stations that have members on recall status. We
will again meet with the company this week to try to finalize
these issues.
