Negotiating Committee
- AFA did not cancel the December mediation session.
- Our Negotiating Committee is meeting today and the rest of this week as originally scheduled.
- We’re counting on you to show up on December 19 for the picket. Management has given us 1.9 billion reasons to demonstrate!
AFA did not cancel the December mediation session
The federal mediator assigned to our negotiations canceled our December session. He had a personal tragedy and called last week to cancel this week’s mediation. We planned on sending out a communication to membership today.
At the Town Hall meeting this morning, VP of People Andy Schneider blamed AFA for canceling the session. Not True! We were disappointed but completely understood the situation with our mediator. Since we had the meeting already scheduled, we turned our time into a prep session for January. We communicated with management that we would physically be here if they needed to meet with us, but that we did not think it would be productive to carry on with the mediation session without the mediator.
Let’s put this in context: AFA canceled our November session after management threw down a woefully inadequate compensation proposal in October and our mediator informed us he would be unable to make the November session. It was obvious we were not in the same arena and were not going to get there without the assistance of our federally appointed mediator. If he was unable to be present for our first mediation session, it made no sense for us to meet with management in negotiations.
Management shows their hand!
Given what management said at the Town Hall meeting, it looks like if we had met with the company’s team, it would have not been very productive. The basic message we heard was: Management made an offer and they’re not really going to change it. That does not sound like “negotiating”, it sounds like stonewalling. Management’s “compensation offer” beat inflation by 1% and in future years we would lose more ground.
Management is willing to spend $1.9 billion to buy Hawaiian Airlines but can’t find the cash to put a decent offer on the table for Flight Attendants.
Our Negotiating Committee is meeting today and for the remainder of this week as originally scheduled. The fact that the Southwest Flight Attendant Tentative Agreement was voted down, Association of Professional Flight Attendant’s request for a release to strike was denied by the National Mediation Board, and the Hawaiian Airlines merger was announced further complicates the negotiation landscape. Our Negotiating Committee considers it a better use of this time to discuss and strategize in lieu of going back and forth with a management team that is unwilling to budge.
We’re counting on you to show up on December 19 for the picket. Management has given us 1.9 billion reasons to demonstrate!