zerozero

You use the word Trust as if you speak for the entire group. MY TRUST in leadership has never been higher and I've been here since the ALPA days. I've seen, weak, foolish, selfish and corrupt leadership at this shop and I can tell you these guys are none of that.

Frankly I don't understand what is so objectionable about union leaders going to work for management.

Every single one of those people, every single one, has flown our aircraft, ate the catering, stayed in same hotels and had travel plans screwed up. That's something you literally cannot say about our last Chief.

On top of that, every single one has sacrificed their personal time to perform countless hours of union work on the Eboard, forming the new 2750 which has given us so many more resources and independence from 1224. They have worked on important issues like Fatigue, Scheduling, Training and COVID, all with the best interests of the membership in mind.

Every single one walked on the picket lines during our informational picketing 2016-2020. Did you know that the company would send employees out to take photos of the picketers and then check their schedules to see if they had called in sick to go picketing?

The culture of the last management team was highly vengeful.

The changes washing over this organization, FINALLY after 30 years, are the direct result of Apollo wiping out that last culture of revenge; corruption (e.g. Polar fraud); incompetence (CEO, VP of Flt Ops); and carelessness (DuFour).

What we have now is a new CEO, a new VP of Flt Ops and a new team of Chiefs. I've met all of them and all of them have my utmost esteem having previously worked under a bunch of sharks.

But somehow your Trust with a capital T has been compromised? GMAFB. The FRAGILITY of your Trust is concerning. Your suspicious insinuations are insulting.

Elevation

If you don't see a problem with leadership of a union joining a management track, you're deciding to ignore fundamentals of human motivations and decision making. Do you really not see a conflict of interest when union leaders join company leadership? The people can be above board but the efforts and systems they oversee are still compomised. That's why lawyers, realtors, accountants etc. have safeguards against conflicts of interest. This is also common sense. When was the last time you heard of someone using the same divorce lawyer as their spouse? It's the trust in union systems not trust in individuals that's at issue here. This is why no MEC chair has ever said "I hope I can be the next chief pilot after this!" in any official statement. They know, we know and you know that this conflict of interest is a problem.

You want to tie this to specific people so we don't look systemic shortfalls. You paint new chiefs from the union as some kind of major departure from the chiefs that we had in the past, and you name one former chief specifically. Who do you think selected and cultivated these people for their roles? There's ideological continuity there.

I share your thoughts on the new CEO.

When you say "trust" you're actually saying "Loyalty". That's why you center your statement on individual leaders and, how they aren't the great enemies of the past. When I say "trust" I'm saying "confidence". We need to be confident that things will work as expected. Because you're focused on loyalty rather than confidence you say "Read your CBA better, lazybones! We're doing everything wonderfully!". Still it's you that feels insulted? Something doesn't fit here.

This is why your type of messaging, not mine, is harming the union leadership you claim to support. By playing the loyalty game, people tie your messages with the people in charge.

Trust means confidence. Confidence in systems means confidence that we recognize shortfalls and improve upon them. We've improved a lot already. There's a long list of MOUs, LOAs, and grievances where the union has gone to bat for its membership. We stopped our low training pay when it seemed like people would be in training for extended periods. We ran elections with independent oversight and records tracking. We got our members long-term disability to age 65. We got a significant increase in retirement contributions. The ASAP committee is tight as a drum, as I said before. It's also worth noting that the security committee has improved in huge ways. Here's the biggest thing: leadership shows they are open to adjusting how we do things. The 07z day issue is an example of that. Recent agreements about scheduling practices are another. So while there are facets of the contract that I believe were written by junior people to sidestep seniority, leadership seems open to fine tuning the contract as necessary. We've moved past saying "We're right. Things are perfect. Problems are imagined.". That's a really big step in the right direction. It deserves to be played up. Any gaggle of personalities can insist they're right. These leaaders are reaching a point where they can identify where they're wrong and make corrections. That inspires confidence.

PS: I enjoy these discussion with you. Let's avoid using people's names, even if they're retirees or management types.

zerozero

To be clear, I do not personally feel insulted. I think your suspicions and allegations of conflicts of interest are insulting towards the new chiefs.

But whatever, we're all adults here. Unfortunately, I actually find it very hard to digest your flowery and philosophical perspectives on the day to day machinations of the hard work that's being done every GD day for the benefit of the crew members.

You may find some utility in mincing words like Trust, Loyaty, Confidence. I don't have time for it.

As for my "messaging" harming union leaders: bullcrap. All I did was point out that a vacancy wasn't needed for a base swap. And you wanna conflate that with : READ THE CBA DUMMY?

Again. GMAFB.

SealingStemBolt

Talking about union volunteers going into management as corruption is simply looking for trouble where there simply is none. What's the alternative? At least these people have track records as pro-union, pro-pilot individuals that have shown their worth to us for many years. Plus, is it that surprising that management would pick people they've worked with face to face for many years with deep understading of the CBA and Atlas' processses? How is this a bad thing?

You know what would be bad? Atlas hiring outsiders into these positions. Someone with zero Atlas experience and bare bones (like wet ATP) flying experience to simply be micromanaging atomatons with zero connection to the pilot group. Or perhaps even worse, well known management sympathizers who are just looking to pad a woefully self-underfunded retirement account.

If you think union volunteers are too buddy-buddy with the company you clearly haven't been paying attention all these years. I honestly can't think of anyone more qualified and good for us pilots than these guys making their way into the Chief Pilot office.

Just don't be surprised if they don't tuck you into bed each night with a kiss on the forehead. Chief pilots are our supervisors and they're wearing different hats now. But at least when it's time to put on your tap shoes for the carpet dance you got someone on the other side of the desk that has been there too.

TiredSoul

You can be a perfectly acceptable Chief Pilot without going through union leadership.
If you don’t see a blatant violation of trust and conflict of interest there I don’t know what is.
Its already bad enough the current leaderboard and the negotiating Comittee are one and the same.
How well do you think they’ll do for us if they’re fishing for a CP appointment?

Ludicrous Speed

Please state how exactly there is a violation of trust and conflict of interest. Also, what if a CP wanted to resign as CP and run for an EXCO position? Would there some trust violation?

We will suppopsedly get to vote this next time. Do you think a negotiating committee member would try to sneak something by the rest of the NC and the union legal counsel hoping that the membership wouldn't catch anything nefarious in the vote for the TA?

Elevation

Those are good questions. The conflict of interest works both ways. In one one way I think you answered your own hypothetical here. The CP would have to resign, then run. No conflict of interest because they resign their role before campaigning for position. But I think you meant something like a CP announcing they were running for union leadership while still holding that CP position. I'm sure a question would come up in a manager or director's mind when that chief decides NOT to go along with some overreaction, etc. Would a particular manager or board member be confident that their executive was acting in the company's interest? I don't think so. This is why you never see sitting chiefs ever run for union positions anywhere. In fact this is why you see non-compete clauses and conflict of interest terms written into the hiring language.. All of that is to maintain the confidence of the board and shareholders in their executive and management team.

I don't think a committee member or eboard member would sneak something past the board or union legal. Union legal and board procedures exist specifically to prevent this. This is also why we have boards and union legal. They exist to prevent individual whims from taking over the direction of the union. There's a robust structure in place that allows us to have confidence in our systems. That's why we have a Teamsters constitutions, etc.

I think when a decision comes up determining how hard we will go after a particular manager's malfeasance or whether we will insist on particular detail in a report, a person who knows they're being considered for management is going to think twice before putting their name on anything that's going to embarass their potential future boss. That's how promotion works everywhere.

A test you could apply is change the technicals of the scenario. I've brought up accountants, lawyers and realtors as examples. There are laws that prevent conflicts of interest in those cases. If you want to stick with union-company examples use stewards, here's one: Would you see a conflict of interest if a steward was actively in the chief pilot pipeline?

As someone else mentioned, there are plenty of good CPs that don't come from union leadership. Managers interact with union leaders regularly, so a the company has a predictable and understood commodity when they hire people they're already working with. This is one reason why I've changed my tune to managing rather than shutting down the union to company pipeline. But we have to manage it and recognize the hazards. We can't bury our heads in the sand on this.

zerozero

Precisely. And furthermore, this is exactly how rumors begin.

"I have suspicions of impropriety and conflicts of interest but no proof."

Lodged the allegation and then leave the various parties to prove their innocence. Talk about undermining Trust and Confidence, you don't have look inside the organization, just log onto APC!

Elevation

There aren't suspicions of conflicts of interest that are unproven. There are straight up conflicts of interest. Leaders of a labor organization tasked with defending pilots' interests against the company interests often join company leadership whie still holding labor leadership roles. That's a conflict of interest. What's to prove?

You keep trying to link this conflict of interest with the idea that we have problems with specific people. I'm talking about problems with how we do things, not about who's doing them. This is also why our messages consistently get distorted to support this personality-based approach.

We say "The way we're doing this is creating problems.", and we're receiving "These guys are solid. Don't question their character.". We're not discussing character. We're discussing process and lack thereof. I've repeated my point. You've repeated your points. Let's move this discussion forward by trying something new.

Ludicrous asked "Does this COI work both ways? What about a CP joining union?" my answer was "Yes. It works both ways..." followed by long-winded explanations. That question-response pathway may be more productive.

I've asked some questions too, and I haven't seen answers to them yet.
1.) "Would you see a problem with a steward joining management while holding on to his stewardship without restrictions?". I haven't had an answer. I also asked about using lawyers and realtors, but they're all similar questions.

I'll add two more:
2.) Is there a reason that bids for base transfers should be done in a way so they don't consider what vacancy more senior people are bidding for?
3.) Is there any process that you think could be done better at our union?

Want to turn this into a question and answer thing? If we can lay this out in terms of processes, not characters, I'm confident a lot of this can get improved.


Aside: Happy holidays! I hope you're home. If not, I hope you're able to enjoy a good meal with good people. It was nice the CP's office offered the meal expense over a few more days this year. That was a classy move.

zerozero

I think this question reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what's happening here. This just would not happen. Ever. That's why the whole "conflict of interest" thing you're pushing is one big red herring.

You are literally, as already stated, searching for a problem that does not exist. It is in fact very suspscious and corrosive to solidarity as we have lots of members who are new to union work and look to more senior members for guidance and perspective. Your guidance and perspective is not helpful to be frank.

First of all, off the top of my head, I can think of two former chief pilots who actually did resign their positions and came over to do lots of union work. One was the former chairman of 1224 (and I'm not talking about the former trustee of 2750; the other is quite active in these threads helping out with recruiting new hires. Maybe you should ask him what he thinks of his possible conflicts of interest.

This is the other problem you're having. You seem to think all union work, no matter what role, is "against company interests". Absolutely incorrect. One of the many benefits of dealing with a "collective" is EFFICIENCY. It's actually in the COMPANY'S interest to engage with ONE "representative" rather than dozens, or even hundreds of individuals. These interactions are not always adversarial. Issues involving Training, Safety, Fatigue and COVID come to mind. There are all highly COOPERATIVE.

So once again, your deep seated suspicions are misplaced and not helpful.

Honestly, I don't follow your question here. The company creates the vacancies by playing with the fleets and their hiring requirements. The bids of senior crew members are almost irrelevent in my opinion but this is not my area of expertise so I'm not going to suggest anything new. We work under the current CBA and that's all that matters to me at this point in time. It behooves all of us to understand and enforce the current CBA.

Merry Christmas to you too.