Dear Flight Attendants,
The full Tentative Agreement (TA) is now available in electronic format.
Alaska-AFA Tentative Agreement (full text)
You will notice several new sections (Hotels and Charters, just to name a couple). We have made a significant effort to move contractual language out of the addendum wherever possible so that the addendum truly is for clarification and examples only. There are also several draft LOAs in the back of the document that still need to be finalized. Finally, in the “main” sections most important to Flight Attendants (e.g. Sections 8 Hours of Service, 10 Scheduling, 21 Compensation) you will see short descriptive headers before a block of language. This is to improve the “readability” of the Agreement. During final clean-up we intend to expand the use of headers into a few other areas.
There are several contractual citations that need to be cross checked, particularly in the addendum. If you find that a citation referring to another section or provision is incorrect, that will be fixed during final clean-up. There are several areas where language, examples or citations are marked with yellow/gray highlighting or “xxx” (in place of a contractual citation). This will mean one of three things: (1) the basic concept is there but the language needs to be revised to make it more clear, (2) the contractual citation needs cross-checked and/or updated, or (3) the example needs amended because of programming changes or requires correction to match the application of the minimum pay rules.
Why isn’t this done already? When we negotiate at the table, we are not always passing full text proposals back and forth. Particularly at the end, we are passing bullet point concepts rather than re-writing each affected section. This is to keep the pace of negotiations moving. Otherwise it could take hours longer for each pass than necessary.
Not only that, but we specifically did not address the addendum during active negotiations except to pull out the relevant contractual language. Therefore no work had been done on the addendum until initial clean-up and formatting. In order to get the full TA in your hands in a timely manner, the parties agreed to wrap the last few pieces up during clean-up. Again, this almost exclusively affects the addendum.
On another note, paper copies are at the printers and we expect the first batch to be delivered on Monday. A much larger batch will be delivered Tuesday and we will begin distributing them to all bases starting on Tuesday. The paper copies will be available at all Flight Attendant domiciles and we’re currently working on a distribution effort for the co-terminals. We have printed enough TAs for every Flight Attendant but not many extras. Therefore, we’re going to ask that you take only one unless you’re picking up a TA for a colleague that you know for a fact needs one.
See you all at the roadshows beginning Monday! Also, check out the new “Tentative Agreement (TA) Information” page: http://alaskamec.org/ta/ .
In solidarity,
Your Negotiating Committee – MEC President Jeffrey Peterson, Brian Tracy, Karina Cameron-Fetters, Jake Jones and AFA Senior Staff Negotiator Paula Mastrangelo
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