Click the link below to view the minutes from the June 18th Quarterly Reserve Meeting with Scheduling Management.
Management and AFA Making Progress on Disputes Related to the Quarterly Productivity Premium (QPP)
Alaska Airlines management and AFA have been in discussions regarding several disputes associated with the Quarterly Productivity Premium (QPP) (see also the June 12th “Where is the Printed Contract?” and/or the “Quarterly Productivity Premium (QPP) Update – April 24, 2015” for more background). After months of back and forth, the parties are now making swift progress towards resolving those disputes.
One aspect of the QPP dispute is in relation to 401(k) contributions
One aspect of the QPP dispute is in relation to 401(k) contributions. At one point management held the position that QPP was not eligible earning for 401(k). We are pleased to report that going forward management has agreed all QPP payouts will be considered eligible earnings for 401(k).
Today’s paycheck contains a make-whole contribution to 401(k) based on Q1 QPP
AFA received “notice” only this morning that the June 19th (today’s) paycheck contains an additional make-whole contribution to 401(k) for those who received the QPP from the first quarter (Q1) (paid on May 5th). That means any Flight Attendant who achieved the Q1 QPP of $500 received an additional pre-tax contribution to 401(k) of $35 on top of your normal 401(k) contribution on today’s paycheck. (This is assuming you are contributing 7% of your earnings to 401(k), which you all should be doing with few exceptions!) You should have also received an additional $35 Company match on top of the normal Company match. In other words, your total 401(k) contribution will be proportionately higher on this check than usual. This is a really good thing—except for the lack of notice!
Roth 401(k) tax implications
For those of you who participate in the Roth 401(k) option, additional funds were withheld for taxes on your portion of the Roth 401(k) contribution at your personal tax rate. On an additional $35 contribution, that would translate to as much as $9 or so more than your usual withholdings based on the higher income tax brackets.
Normal 401(k) contributions on QPP earnings will be paid in Q2 going forward
Beginning with the second quarter QPP payout (Q2 = April, May, June) on August 5th, 401(k) contributions based on QPP earnings will be made normally.
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AFA would have passed this information along to you sooner had we been provided sufficient notice. We will continue to update you on any developments with the QPP disputes as we resolve them.
In Solidarity,
Your MEC – Jeffrey Peterson, Brian Palmer, Yvette Gesch, Becky Strachan, Laura Masserant, Cathy Gwynn, Sandra Morrow, Stephen Couckuyt; and MEC Grievance chairperson Jennifer Wise MacColl
The following is a message about Bridge The Gap, an AFA campaign to help bring equal treatment by management to all Flight Attendants across the industry. Bridge the Gap is a campaign for all Flight Attendants, working to improve pay and working conditions across the entire industry. For more information, follow #BridgeTheGap on Twitter or visit http://www.afacwa.org/bridge_the_gap.
Note from your Master Executive Council (MEC): AFA Alaska supports equal pay, benefits and working conditions for Flight Attendants at our sister carrier Horizon Air—as well as for all regional Flight Attendants throughout the industry. As a point of clarification, Alaska Air Group has never declared bankruptcy nor has been required to restructure or reorganize like most other mainline carriers have in the past decade or so.
Wherever any Flight Attendant is discriminated against, it affects our entire profession. We all want higher pay, better re
st and work rules, affordable health care and a reasonable retirement.
Mainline management throughout the industry, who slashed pay and benefits through bankruptcy, are now using their post-merger consolidation to pit workers against each other.
Management throughout the industry has transferred routes to regional airlines and with it Flight Attendant jobs move to a structure with 45% less pay and benefits where we serve the same passengers paying the same ticket price to travel those routes.
And, there’s so much more than wages at stake, such as fighting fatigue. We all need adequate work rules to perform as aviation’s first responders.
Discrimination only exists if we fail to act when we think it doesn’t affect us individually. We must work together in solidarity to support each other and end discrimination that will undercut our careers. Equal pay for equal work – we will all do better together.
In Solidarity,
Your MEC – Jeffrey Peterson, Brian Palmer, Yvette Gesch, Becky Strachan, Laura Masserant, Cathy Gwynn, Sandra Morrow and Stephen Couckuyt
Note from your Master Executive Council (MEC): The AFA International office prepared this information as a resource for flight attendants. You can find a pdf version of this article here and the dues pie chart here.
The Dues Pie Chart — Where Do My Dues Go?
The Dues Pie Chart depicts where all funds at AFA are budgeted. About 80% of dues dollars are directly allocated to fund the work at each airline, e.g. Local Councils, Master Executive Councils, Negotiations, and System Board. The remaining budgets at the International Office support Government Affairs, Air Safety, EAP, and Communications Departments, each of which provides expert services that are Flight Attendant focused and provide resources for the local leaders and committees of Flight Attendants at each airline. 100% of our dues dollars are allocated to priorities that provide Flight Attendant representation.
There are four distinct areas where dues money is spent:
1. Local and Airline-specific
Each base has a Local Executive Council (LEC) with elected Officers who provide direct representation and deal with local grievances and other issues. These Local Officers will answer your phone calls and make sure member interests are represented in front of management. For example, in the event of discipline or a contract violation, Local Officers will address the issue where it happened and work to get swift resolution. Additionally, elected Master Executive Council (MEC) Officers provide representation at the corporate level. At both the LEC and MEC, there are committees that solve problems in areas such as safety, schedules, hotels, grievances, etc. These committees also enforce the contract specific to their area of expertise, produce newsletters, and participate in union meetings. The role of your LEC and MEC Officers and committee representatives at each airline is to ensure you are represented by Flight Attendants who know your job because they share it with you at your airline. AFA promotes this autonomy at each airline where your representatives, assisted by experts, negotiate with management and develop and maintain the relationship between airline management and the Union.
2. Negotiations
Bargaining for pay and working conditions is one of the core representation activities performed by the Union. We start with a membership survey, schedule meetings with management, conduct caucuses with the committee, develop contractual language, support membership engagement and information programs, and we work with AFA-CWA professional negotiators throughout the process including all direct negotiations/mediation with management. The end result is improved contractual language with higher pay, better working conditions, and improved benefits.
3. System Board (Grievances)
The first step in any grievance is to try to resolve the matter locally. Some airlines have negotiated an alternative dispute process for a faster, collaborative resolution. If that fails, then the final stage for resolution, whether disciplinary or contractual, is an appeal to a neutral arbitrator. An AFA-CWA attorney will work with our Grievance Committee to present our case to the neutral arbitrator. We defend the contracts we negotiate.
4. International Office Support
While your LEC is the face of the Union to local management and the MEC to corporate management, the International Office is the public persona and brand of the Union. Our presence and name recognition can legislate or improve federal regulations, remove obstacles from the bargaining table, better our position in negotiations and improve our experience on the job across the profession. The International Office maintains the professional staff of attorneys, negotiators, and other personnel that provide administration, accounting and membership services to members and elected leaders. We all work together to support the programs that encompass our profession.
Questions? Contact your Local Executive Council president here.
In Solidarity,
Your MEC – Jeffrey Peterson, Brian Palmer, Yvette Gesch, Becky Strachan, Laura Masserant, Cathy Gwynn, Sandra Morrow and Stephen Couckuyt
Pie Chart – 2015 – Where Do My Dues Go
Pie Chart – 2015 – MEC LEC SPLIT.FINAL
Restaurant Discount
The ORD hotel is no longer offering crews the 50% discount off food. This was a promotion that was being offered by the hotel. The discount will revert to the contractual 20% discount with crew ID.
Airport Construction
Construction will be going on at ORD to the upper ramp. During the construction, all pick-up and drop off will be at the lower ramp, where all of the hotel shuttles pick up.
Questions?
Please contact your Local Hotel Committee
Note from your Master Executive Council (MEC): This document was prepared by the AFA International office as a resource for flight attendants and is available on the AFA Board of Directors website here as well as on the AFA Alaska website here.
Your AFA Dues 2015: Funding Our Flight Attendant Priorities
As union members, our power comes from two sources:
1) an informed, active membership speaking as one; and
2) all of us contributing dues to resource our priorities.
Member dues maintain the essential programs and services that AFA members rely on every day. Everyone hears about negotiations, contract grievances and due process with job security, but your union dues support so much more – especially since our union is the leading voice on safety, health and security in the cabin.
AFA leaders examine every budget to ensure we can maximize the value of our dues. We are AFA – the dues are simply one way that we all chip in and collectively contribute to defend and advance our careers.
The method established within our Constitution and Bylaws (C&B) ensures that the dues structure is reviewed annually. Prior to the start of each fiscal year, we take a snapshot of the dues average of all CWA members, including AFA, to determine the dues rate for the future budget year. This dues realignment, referred to as the ‘CWA dues average,’ is a part of our Merger Agreement, which was approved by a full AFA membership vote in 2003. Dues may be increased above this dues average in order to support the priorities of AFA members, but through careful review and respectful consideration AFA leaders were able to hold dues to this average dues rate.
AFA is committed to maintaining a sound financial base to support activities that benefit Flight Attendants. Our dues rates are still among the lowest in aviation. Mergers have resulted in AirTran and US Airways AFA members (approximately 20% of our membership) no longer contributing to our collective resources. Despite this resource challenge, locally elected Flight Attendant leaders who form the AFA-CWA Board of Directors successfully adopted a budget to keep that vast majority of our budgets exactly the same. The only change made to budgeting was a restructuring of the number of AFA staff, which reduced the budget maintained by our International Office.
Local, MEC, Negotiations and System Board budgets will remain the same – which maintains our democratic member-driven organization by pushing the $2 monthly dues increase to the budgets that directly fund representation at a local level. Meanwhile, AFA utilized an Early Out option to restructure our professional staff ranks. Although fewer staff remain, we were able to maintain strong AFA Departments of attorneys, professional negotiators, safety, health and security experts, AFA EAP mental health professionals, Government Affairs specialists, Membership Services/Accounting and we are in process of redesigning Communications with new, combined positions.
We were also able to maintain all of the affiliations that keep our voice strong through coordination with other aviation unions, the AFL-CIO resources and national structure as well as coordination with transport unions around the world. This maintains our standing in legislative or policy discussions in Washington, DC and around the world – critically important perhaps more than ever as globalization presents serious threats to our jobs, as well as opportunities if we continue to exercise our voice effectively through our world-wide networks. (See the 2015 International President’s Report for a review of some of this work)
Dues have held relatively steady, increasing just three times over the past 22 years. Beginning in June of this year, our dues will change to $50 per month in accordance with our Constitution and Bylaws. When you consider the voice we have through our union, and all of the work we must do to advance and defend our careers – we are putting our dues dollars to good work. Our collective action, organized through our union and funded by our collective contributions, is what really makes the difference. We are all AFA and we encourage all Flight Attendants to join and stand with us: “We are Stronger Together, Better Together.”
Dues Dollars Help Provide:
- A legally binding negotiated contract.
- Due process to defend our jobs and grievance procedures.
- Professional negotiators and labor attorneys.
- Expert safety, health, and security advocates for your protection.
- A strong voice on Capitol Hill.
- An award-winning AFA Employee Assistance Program.
- Strength in numbers as a member of a democratic, member-driven organization
- Flight Attendant focused advocacy.
We are AFA – our dues are simply one way that we all chip in and collectively contribute to defend and advance our careers.
In Solidarity,
Your MEC – Jeffrey Peterson, Brian Palmer, Yvette Gesch, Becky Strachan, Laura Masserant, Cathy Gwynn, Sandra Morrow and Stephen Couckuyt
2015 – AFA Dues – Funding Our Flight Attendant Priorities
Just when you thought implementation of the new contract was going (relatively) smoothly…
According to the Contract Implementation Schedule, Open Time was scheduled for implementation in July for the August bid month. Unfortunately, AFA received notice from management yesterday that implementation of the new Open Time trading system will be delayed at least one month.
You may access an electronic copy of the notice (that lists all the technical reasons for the delay) here.
Reasons why it is taking so long
AFA has participated in almost all of the implementation meetings and updates and we can assure you that management and Jeppesen (the provider of Maestro and eMaestro) have been working on updating the crew tracking and trading system ever since the contract ratified. There are several reasons why it is taking so long to reprogram the system:
- Alaska will begin transitioning to a new crew tracking system later next year but until then we have to manage to get along with our current system.
- Maestro/eMaestro is antiquated and fragile. All parties are being cautious with any changes because there is concern that significant new programming will destabilize the system enough to completely crash it. For those of you who have been around long enough, can you imagine having to go back to email trades? Not good!
- There are very few programmers left at Jeppesen who even work with the underlying framework of Maestro/eMaestro. Only two carriers use this system (one being Alaska). That means there are limited resources that can be allocated to reprogramming.
AFA and management believe it is prudent to wait another month
Alaska Airlines management and AFA do not want to go live with a new Open Time trading system that has the possibility of crashing not only Open Time but also electronic trip trading in general. Although this is a disappointing development, we want the new Open Time system to be a success. Therefore AFA and management believe it is prudent to wait another month in order to provide more time to properly debug the system. As a reminder, the trial period of the new Open Time trading system begins once the system is actually implemented.
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In Solidarity,
Your MEC – Jeffrey Peterson, Brian Palmer, Yvette Gesch, Becky Strachan, Laura Masserant, Cathy Gwynn, Sandra Morrow, Stephen Couckuyt; and MEC Scheduling chairperson Jake Jones
6.12.15 OT Delay letter to AFA
What is taking so darned long?
AFA is still working as quickly as possible with management to finalize the contract in preparation for publication. So what is taking so darned long?
This is the first negotiations to revise and clean up the contract basically cover to cover since 1994
One challenge is that although there have been several rounds of negotiations since we inherited our contract from Southwest Airlines in 1994, this is the first negotiations to revise and clean up the entire contract basically cover to cover. Based on the negotiations surveys and input from your Negotiating Committees and the Master Executive Council (MEC) leadership, this round of negotiations was mandated to include more “heavy maintenance” than in the past.
The Alaska Airlines management and AFA negotiating committees did their absolute best to meet this mandate prior to publication of the Tentative Agreement. However, the reality is that once the TA2 document went “live” as a working contract the parties found several passages that deserved clarification. Our thought process is that we all have to live with this document for at least another four and a half years, so it’s important we get the printed contract just right in order to maximize readability.
Limited management resources due to Beyond Service Experience
Another challenge is limited management resources due to Beyond Service Experience (BSE). Although BSE is technically unrelated to contract cleanup work, Inflight management is fully immersed in BSE in addition to running the airline. Consequently, scheduling adequate time for cleanup work has been a challenge for the past several months. This isn’t a criticism of BSE but we’re simply explaining the reality of limited time with Inflight management due to BSE. Regardless of BSE, both parties are highly motivated to complete the contract document.
Dispute over the Quarterly Productivity Premium
A third challenge is the dispute over the Quarterly Productivity Premium (QPP). AFA communicated to you about this issue in the “Quarterly Productivity Premium (QPP) Update – April 24, 2015.” In addition to the original issue with QPP there have been some other tangential disputes related to QPP that have arisen since that communication. However, both parties have been working very hard to resolve QPP outside of the arbitration process. Please be assured your MEC will be fully briefed on any terms and will decide how to proceed. Ideally the parties would like to incorporate any modifications to QPP into the final print version, so we’re holding off on finalizing the contract document for just a little longer to see how QPP plays out.
Stranded Pay in Section 21.N
The final challenge is Stranded Pay in Section 21.N. Frankly, the parties ran out of time to deal with Stranded Pay at what became our final negotiating session in Chicago. As a reminder, the parties were under significant pressure from the National Mediation Board (NMB) to reach a deal in Chicago “or else.” (What the “or else” meant in our minds was the very real possibility of no more mediation sessions for quite some time.) With the addition of all the new Minimum Pay Rules, what was already very complicated in Stranded Pay under the old contract became even more complicated. Not only that but there is significant grievance history on Stranded Pay. Both parties believe modified language to 21.N is warranted so that everybody understands how Stranded Pay works.
The good news…
The good news is that we really are very, very close to moving to the next steps in the process. Those steps would include a final walkthrough with the MEC for approval and then the document would be indexed. At that point the final document would be sent off the printer for publication and the electronic version would be made immediately available on the AFA Alaska website as well on the Inflight Mobile Device.
Typical turnaround time for a published contract is somewhere between three months to over a year
As a reminder, the Master Executive Council (MEC) asked AFA International how long it typically takes to publish a contract following ratification and were informed that we’re well within the ballpark: ranging between three months to over a year. We’re still doing our absolute best to minimize the turnaround!
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In Solidarity,
Your MEC – Jeffrey Peterson, Brian Palmer, Yvette Gesch, Becky Strachan, Laura Masserant, Cathy Gwynn, Sandra Morrow and Stephen Couckuyt
Congratulations to Tim Green, our new LOCAL SCHEDULING CHAIR. He will be the person advocating for our LAX flight attendant schedules and overseeing scheduling issues.
With our new contract we formed a new MEC Scheduling Committee. Jake Jones was appointed by the MEC as the new MEC Scheduling Chair. Our LEC Scheduling Chair Tim Green will be working with him and other chairs from all other bases.
We are also excited that LAXFA Sherrijon Gaspard has been selected as AFA’s Pairing Analyst. She took over Jeff Stein’s position earlier this year.
We want to thank Tim, Jake, and Sherrijon in advance for all of their hard work ahead. Please reach out to either of them with any of your suggestions and concerns. They would love to receive your feedback.
Tim Green ScheduleLAX@yahoo.com
Sherrijon Gaspard sggaspard@gmail.com
The AFA International office is in the process of documenting the actions and decisions taken at this year’s Board of Directors (BOD) meeting.
While not complete, some of the key documents from the BOD are now online. Please feel free to go to the BOD website (http://afa-bod.org/) where you will find the International president’s report, remarks of the three International officers, a listing of all agenda Items, a listing of all resolutions, and information about how AFA uses dues money to fund Flight Attendant priorities (“Your AFA Dues: Funding Our Flight Attendant Priorities”)*.
AFA will have other items to post to the BOD website in the coming weeks. This includes items such as a dues pie chart and accompanying text (“Where Do My Dues Go?”)*, BOD awards (text and photo for each), videos & photos (delegates & staff), speakers bios, and links to organizations (e.g. Airline Ambassadors, TTD, UniteHERE, RAFA, CWA, etc.).
*The Master Executive Council (MEC) will be publishing this information over the next few days.
We hope you find this information useful. If you have any questions, contact your Local Executive Council (LEC) officers.
In Solidarity,
Your MEC – Jeffrey Peterson, Brian Palmer, Yvette Gesch, Becky Strachan, Laura Masserant, Cathy Gwynn, Sandra Morrow and Stephen Couckuyt
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