Are you not on the email list of your local or are they not sending anything? I've received notes at least 1 time a week if not more. Here are the latest three.
Friends
I am still in DCA. Late last night we sent a new proposal over to the company
for their evaluation and comments. We feel again we have met our "bogie"
number. We are standing by for a response. Today we will visit the company to
discuss some key points of our proposal that pertain to benefits and answer
any questions they may have about our latest proposal.
Your bargaining team consists of: Local Presidents, CWA Staff, Bankruptcy
Attorneys, Labor Law Attorney's, Investment bankers, Analysts, Benefit
Specialist and Negotiation Specialist.
Thank you for your support.
Hi yall,
All the meetings we had yesterday about the pension plan and the calibration of numbers which has changed over the past couple of weeks were disappointing. The numbers meeting did not take place due to the length of the pension plan meeting.
As you may know we are trying to get a pension plan away from the company for a couple of reasons. One is that the company would no longer have to manage the old plan that many of us have money frozen into. (it would be put in a new plan that would be managed by another pension fund organization) The other reason is it would give people the opportunity to have a pension again that would grow in time and pay a monthly dividend when one retires. The company would still have to fund the old plan to some degree however you would be able to place money in it as well. This would be a win for both sides if the company would agree to it.
The company had 3 reasons for rejecting the pension fund we had selected to be our pension plan administrator. These reasons had to do with the companies liability in these funds, the funds present funding ratio and the ratio of active Vs inactive people in the fund. I am not an actuary and probably could not explain this to the average person in a way that it would be easily understood however, this is the gist of the company's rejection to our proposal which would have given us about 25 million dollar Credit towards our bogie number.
We are going back to discuss our options today. We will also meet with the company to discuss the change in the way they are now calculating our numbers. Its not over yet. We have to come up with a different pension fund management company (there is only a hand full of large funds out there) or find a way to trim another 25+ million out of our proposal. This is no easy task and takes many hours of discussion and calculating.
Thank you all for your patience and support. Hopefully today will be more productive for both sides.
Thursday, August 29, 2002
The CWA Local Presidents have been in Washington DC all week drafting proposals and exchanging information with management in an attempt to reach agreement on management's restructuring proposals. On Friday, 8/16 following the bankruptcy filing, CWA'ers made a new proposal to management, and they made another post-bankruptcy proposal again this week on Tuesday, 8/27. On Wednesday, 8/28, representatives of the committee, along with legal and financial advisors met with management to try to iron out financial questions.
Attorneys and financial advisors, along with staff and committee members have been in touch with management virtually every day on various subjects. They have been trying to get accurate and consistent costing of the recent CWA proposals. One difficulty we are having is that the evaluations of our proposals by management are not always consistent, and that makes the management's "bogey" number a moving target.
Our goals remain the same: we are trying to reach agreement on structural changes to benefit the airline, but at the same time maintain the highest passenger service rate of pay possible, keep our healthcare plan affordable, and limit, as much as possible, the damages to our benefits and paid time off.
These are very difficult negotiations. Over the last 3 months CWA'ers have made 12 written, comprehensive proposals to management, attempting to resolve our differences (proposals were made on 5/22, 5/29, 6/5, 6/6, 6/10, 6/12, 7/3, 7/16, 7/24, 8/10, 8/16, and 8/27). We continue work on this.
We are continuing to exchange information daily with management and are trying to reach agreement on an acceptable proposal that agents can vote to accept or reject.
If we are able to reach that agreement the vote will be conducted by a third party (the American Arbitration Association) and each agent will have the option of voting via phone or internet. We will keep you posted of any progress.
CWA Local Officers and Staff
They arent going to give you specific numbers at this point until something comes out one way or the other.
