The Principal Officers and the Airline Division held a call on Monday, November 10th as previously reported. There were several options discussed to present to the thirteen member negotiating committee. The result of that meeting led to a conference call with the thirteen-member committee on Tuesday, November 11th. On the call, Division Director Bourne presented what has been discussed with the mediator and the PO’s. Director Bourne explained that the Division would support whichever choice the committee ultimately makes. He then left the call to give the committee members an opportunity to discuss the choices that were presented. After Director Bourne left the call the negotiating committee members briefly discussed what was presented and determined they would need a face-to-face meeting amongst themselves to make the decision. The committee also requested that the BA’s and Airline Division attend the meeting. The committee is planning to meet in Houston on November 20th. The results of the meeting will be reported in the Dispatch.
Seniority Integration Update
In conjunction with negotiations the week of October 20th in Chicago, the seniority integration sub committee continued the work of creating a merged seniority list. This two-member committee was assisted by a member of management for the purpose of researching employment history for those members that have had past seniority adjustments, and to determine accurate placement on the final list.
During the last meeting of the Seniority Committee held in Seattle, Washington (Go Hawks) it was explained that the tie breaker remedy between airlines was flawed and would need a new solution. To explain; it was originally decided that if for the purposes of RIF and Recall seniority a tie should occur between employee or groups of employees of sub-airlines, the order would be selected by a pre-determined flip of the coin. Based on that coin toss, the Committee had determined that the first tie shall be in the order of: 1-CMI, 2-UAL, and 3-CAL. The next tie shall be broken by UAL, then CAL, and then CMI. The third tie shall be in the order of CAL, then CMI, and then UAL. All subsequent ties are to be broken in this sequence throughout the remainder of the list.
A problem in this system would be created if there was a challenge to our completed list and the challenge was upheld. If the challenge resulted in a tie, how then would the challenger be inserted into the list without disturbing the make up of the entire list?
It became very obvious to the committee that a new system had to be put in place to break ties when employees from more than one company shared the same RIF and Recall date. This tie breaker had to be random and should not disturb the original order of each sub groups tied employees.
A solution to use the last four digits of the employee’s social security number was finally accepted by all committee numbers. To be clear, this use of the last four digits will only determine the order in which employees from different airlines share the same RIF and Recall date. The original method to break ties will continue to be used and this solution will not disrupt the make up of the order in which ties are sorted.
To explain; in any given date let’s say there are 9 employees with the same RIF and Recall date. 3 are from CAL, 4 from UAL, and 2 from CMI. We will take the top employee from each airline based on the predetermination used to break ties from each book (last four from UA and Birthday form CAL and CMI) and put them in order base on the last four numbers of each employee Social Security Number. We then move on to the second set of employees from each group, then the third and so on until the process is complete. This will give us a random order to place employees without disturbing each original airline order.
During the meeting with the company we ran several experiments of applying this system of breaking ties when ties, or groups of ties, occurred between the three airlines. We found that this system will work easily with no error and will provide the randomness desired while keeping each sub group in their original order.
Next, we resumed determining the correct RIF and Recall seniority for those who had breaks in service due to LOA’s as explained in the first paragraph.
In this task we look at each individual with an adjustment due to a leave of absence and determine what the RIF and Recall date should be using the outline described by Arbitrator Ralph Berger. In many cases the date remains the same but in some cases an adjustment is required. We started with a list of around 1800 last year and we are nearing the end of that list.
It is understood that there is no benefit to be had by either party in delaying this process. The committee is currently working through the Division to schedule meetings with the company in the near future in order to see this task completed as soon as possible.
Future developments will be reported in the Dispatch.