Labor Advisory Committee report September 5, 2007, CWA Staff Representative
The Labor Advisory committee met in Phoenix for their quarterly session on September 5, 2007 at the Ritz Carlton hotel.
The CWA presented the following issue to Doug Parker and the Committee for this meeting;
Mandatory overtime in the airports, again a constant problem that is not going away. The staffing levels are not where they should be and the turn over rate, due to the low starting rate of pay in RES and the airports, is causing very low morale and people are leaving for better paying jobs. The level of knowledge required and amount of stress that the agents are under is the main cause for the attrition in customer service system wide.
The CSS agents are being forced to issue the mandatory overtime notices in the mid-size and smaller stations , which is a violation of the Mandatory overtime language in our CBA and the Mandatory overtime arbitration ruling from a few years back. Doug was advised that a local east manager thought it was ok to use non-management people to issue the mandatory and was told that when a steward filed a grievance on it being done incorrectly, the manager took the position that you are grieving one of your own members so it is an invalid grievance. Doug was told the CWA is not in agreement with a CSS issuing mandatory notices, that they now have shift managers in the east where we did not have them before and those are the people who should be issuing the mandatory overtime. The CWA also told the committee that many locations leave new hire agents to work alone at the end of the night to deal with irregular operations without any shift managers on duty. We also said we are not going to continue to stay past our shifts unless we are mandatoried per our contract by "management" . If no one in management tells us to stay via the negotiated process, we are going home at the end of our shifts on time. Shift managers are not being scheduled at night in many cities and that needs to be corrected as soon as possible.
The Labor Advisory committee met in Phoenix for their quarterly session on September 5, 2007 at the Ritz Carlton hotel.
The CWA presented the following issue to Doug Parker and the Committee for this meeting;
Mandatory overtime in the airports, again a constant problem that is not going away. The staffing levels are not where they should be and the turn over rate, due to the low starting rate of pay in RES and the airports, is causing very low morale and people are leaving for better paying jobs. The level of knowledge required and amount of stress that the agents are under is the main cause for the attrition in customer service system wide.
The CSS agents are being forced to issue the mandatory overtime notices in the mid-size and smaller stations , which is a violation of the Mandatory overtime language in our CBA and the Mandatory overtime arbitration ruling from a few years back. Doug was advised that a local east manager thought it was ok to use non-management people to issue the mandatory and was told that when a steward filed a grievance on it being done incorrectly, the manager took the position that you are grieving one of your own members so it is an invalid grievance. Doug was told the CWA is not in agreement with a CSS issuing mandatory notices, that they now have shift managers in the east where we did not have them before and those are the people who should be issuing the mandatory overtime. The CWA also told the committee that many locations leave new hire agents to work alone at the end of the night to deal with irregular operations without any shift managers on duty. We also said we are not going to continue to stay past our shifts unless we are mandatoried per our contract by "management" . If no one in management tells us to stay via the negotiated process, we are going home at the end of our shifts on time. Shift managers are not being scheduled at night in many cities and that needs to be corrected as soon as possible.
