The FAA Follies

I think this might be the last one in this series. Hope you’re sticking with me.

Back to Marty and Confessions of a Union Buster:

“the ‘merit raise’ had nothing at all to do with merit and was anything but innovative. It was, quite plainly, favoritism institutionalized, an excuse to hand out favors to toadies and punish the truculent.”

NATCA worked for a lot of years to get rid of the old PER system, which was supposedly merit-based. The OSI/SCI system as it was originally negotiated with NATCA made sense. We accomplish the metrics as a team or we don’t. We didn’t penalize any one individual for having an error. One error that might’ve taken 1 minute out of the 2080 hours (124,800 minutes if anyone’s counting) that we work a year (before overtime). The Agency chose to take the sensible OSI/SCI negotiated system and turn it into a “merit-based” farce. But, hey, Bruce Johnson now supposedly says he does not believe in the SCI percentages and the OSI/SCI is not meeting the Agency’s needs.

“By dragging a union through the plodding legal system, we showed workers that the labor organization was sluggish and inefficient…”

“…specialty was delay tactics…management would almost always win a war of attrition”

From a labor relations report for NATCA encompassing a recent two-week period:

Despite both our request for a briefing and national grievance, the Agency has yet to respond. The matter has been elevated to the arbitration level.

Despite our request for a briefing for further information, the Agency never responded a national grievance was filed.

To this date, the Agency has failed to brief the Union on this matter and has refused to enter into negotiations. As a result, a national grievance has been filed.

Without a response from the Agency, a national grievance was filed.

NATCA requested a briefing on this matter. Despite our request, the Agency never responded. The matter has been elevated to the national grievance level.

The Agency notified employees via email but never properly notified NATCA.

NATCA was never properly notified.

Despite our request, the Agency never responded, the matter was elevated to the national grievance level.

Without a response from the Agency, the matter was elevated to the national grievance level.

Delay, delay, delay. Increase the frustration of the workforce and try to direct it to turn on the union(s). At the time I’m writing this, it’s been 626 days without a contract for the controllers; even longer for other bargaining units.

“bought off a handful of the former union activists right away, through minor promotions.”

And a raise in their pay that the Agency had previously capped. Don’t even get me started on this one. Wonder if this comes under the heading of “nurturing the troublemakers.”

“I knew the federal mediation system was bullshit…the joke is that the mediator can do nothing to compel agreement.”

And Miniace and company, of course, used this to their advantage. It’s also why the Agency is desperately fighting the legislation that has binding arbitration language.

“I dug a deep trench down the middle of the work force”

“I capitalized on those divisions [between workers] and amplified them..”

Here is the danger, folks. Now is not the time to doing the union-busters’ work for them. It’s not inspector vs. technician, FSS vs. controller, dues-paying vs. non-dues paying, activist vs. non-activist, old pay scale vs. imposed pay scale time. It’s us vs. them. It’s the workers against the Agency. The Agency is working very hard and spending a great deal of taxpayer money to create those divisions between those of us IN the damned trenches. Only we can keep them from succeeding.

“In truth, strike contingency plans have but one dual aim: to scare the workers and rout the union….Once again the workers would be made to feel they could not possibly win.”

I’m already seeing some of this fear increase my facility, even though there is no talk of striking. Why bother fighting since the Agency will do what it wants anyway? If you don’t fight, you have NO chance of winning and have handed the Agency its most effective weapon, an apathetic, disenfranchised, beaten-down workforce. I’m sure the flying public will feel safer knowing that.

“They were bosses who didn’t know their workers and didn’t particularly care to know them…They [the workers] should be grateful for a paycheck.”

Remember the Academy students who got treated to the “Don’t like it, leave” speeches? How about Jim Peters telling the controllers in Philadelphia if they thought the procedures were unsafe, they should look for work elsewhere?

“the most important word in this [union-busting] business…is control”

“that management would continue to wield absolute control over its workers – that lust for control is, of course, what moved chief executives to agree to hand over control to us”

“The guys I met wanted to know what their employees were thinking so they could control them better.”

Control the controllers (or the inspectors, or the technicians, or any Agency employee). That’s what this is all about. Management feels out of control (well, they certainly are now and not because the unions made them do anything).

“Taking back the Agency.” Where the hell did they think it went? They only want to “take it back” to sell it off anyway.

Control. They’ve got it; they always had it. They just wanted it all. They wanted to do whatever the hell they wanted without workers’ input, whenever the hell they wanted without repercussions for trampling on workers’ rights.

Control. They’ve got it now to do whatever the hell they want, whenever they want; feel the trampling?

Control. They’ve got control to look like total morons and idiots in front of Congress, the media and the flying public.

When they worked collaboratively with the unions, they produced a much better product. But now they’re in control and doing it their way. Delays and errors are going up. Retirements, resignations and terminations are through the roof. Overtime usage probably hasn’t been this high since the early 1980s. Deployment of equipment hasn’t gotten any faster or any cheaper, even though they’ve eliminated the redundancies controllers and techs consider essential to safety. Certainly doesn’t work as well as when the controllers and the techs could get them to fix problems BEFORE we worked with the equipment with live traffic. They’re being investigated by the Inspector General, the Office of Special Counsel, Congress and looked at very closely in the court of public opinion.

“…think of my work as absurd and vulgar….knowing all along that inside I was just a weak little man.”

Union busters are weak, small individuals who lie, cheat, distort, manipulate, threaten and scam all in the name of control. Those that knowingly aid them are just as small and weak. The strange part is that management allows themselves to be controlled by these individuals so that management can have the illusion of controlling us.

“The enemy was the collective spirit.” “…a united workforce, the dreaded foe of any corporate tyrant.”

To quote Paul Rinaldi, NATCA’s Executive Vice President, “Our collective spirit is their enemy.”

If they break our spirit, they’ll have won more than a white book. They’ll have won control over the disheartened souls of our collective spirit. And if we’ve seen nothing else over the last 18 months, it’s that the Agency is a very bad winner.

To repeat myself (or Marty, in this case):

“Union busting is a field populated by bullies and built on deceit. A campaign against a union is an assault on individuals and a war on truth. As such, it is a war without honor. The only way to bust a union is to lie, distort, manipulate, threaten and always, always attack.”

And to quote Paul:

Our collective spirit is their enemy.

I’ll say it again, and I’ll keep saying it for as long as it takes. I hope you do, too.

Our collective spirit is their enemy.

So where was I? Oh, yes. Confessions of a Union Buster. Marty states in his book, over and over, how he manipulated management at all levels, but no one worse than the supervisors.

“The supervisors served as my front line. I took them hostage on the first day and sent them to my anti-union boot camp. I knew that people that didn’t feel threatened wouldn’t fight.”

“They soon came to see the fight through the eyes of their captor and went to work wringing union sympathies out of their workers.”

“Each front-line supervisor…would be taught to identify and analyze the power relationships among his subordinates, in order to focus his coercive energy on the workers with the greatest influence and thus more efficiently control the attitudes and behaviors of the whole group.”

“made sure supervisors went home wondering if they would have a job in the morning”

When did the Agency change the title from Operational Supervisor to Front Line Manager (FLM)? About the time Miniace came onboard? Why the change? Back then, I just made the assumption that it was change for change’s sake, as so often happens in the federal government, but now I’m not so sure. Could it be to somehow convince the supervisors that they were more important in the overall picture than they are?

We can, and often do, run shifts without supes or FLMs. Now they even want us to do our own ratings. But let’s say you’re a union-buster and you need the buy-in from the first line of management…to spy, to coerce, to do your dirty deeds…all in the name of “taking back the Agency.” It’s now a crusade; give them a title to commensurate with what you’re telling them their new role is. You’re our “front line”; you need to “manage” the people; you need to be in charge; the union’s been usurping your authority all these years – go take it back.

St. Louis Koolaid Fest in 2006 ring a bell with anyone? The one where FAA management was pretty much told, “our way or the highway?” I know my Air Traffic Manager (ATM) came back with a fear for his job…and a couple FLMs who gulped the Koolaid spiked by Miniace and company fanned the fear to keep him in line and show what good “company” men they were.

“Perhaps most important, the…managers learned the tricks of evading the so-called union problem: by appearing to listen to their employees and to encourage openness, by making policies simple and clear, and by relaxing some rules. And yes, they were tricks. Sleight-of-hand.” “

Give the workers just enough rope so that they believe they are off the leash, just enough to fool them into scorning the union.”

A consistent lie that Marty told upper management: “…supervisors will learn to be the leaders they should have been all along. They’ll learn to make their people happy and to love what they do.”

Go back and read some of the SUPCOM notes on The Main Bang with the above excerpts in mind for context. Some of the better ones:

SUPCOM facility chairs are the most influential person in the facility (don’t get it mixed up with most powerful).

SUPCOM stands for leadership and communication. Rise to the challenges that face us as an organization.

Be listeners. When your employees speak, stop and listen, then formulate a response. How often do you formulate a response before the person has stopped talking?

Be leaders for the organization.

We are the point on the spear.

Leadership is behavior.

Change is hard, even when obvious.

We are the problem and solution.

Listen and nurture troublemakers.

3 Behavior’s of Communication
1. Advocacy (send mode) 2. Inquiry (receive mode) 3. Acknowledgement (bridge between advocacy and inquiry)

Listen to employees; summarize what employee’s have said to show you heard.

Be leaders

Stand strong

We need to do a better job getting information out to employees.

As FLM you accomplish work through others.

Times now are a lot like after the 81’ strike; you came into work and made it work.

We just can’t sit back, get involved.

We are being looked at like never before. Every time you look in the paper or watch the news, we are right there.

It’s how we pay attention to details that will get us out the spotlight.

If you see something wrong, address it, make the correction if warranted

You are the change agents

The FLM influences where we are going in the future

The employees are turning to you for the example

You have a leadership role with your peers and above

Reaching out to new employees is very important

“I met with supervisors regularly in order to add a few strokes to the portrait I was painting in their minds, the portrait of an inept, uncaring, and potentially dangerous union. Under the blessed banner of ‘communication’ I reported on the pathetic bargaining sessions, I floated rumors, spread fear.”

Marty said a number of times in his book that he’d pepper his distortions with just enough truth to be believable. The whole point was to ensure the supervisors spread the “truth” he wanted known to achieve the end goal of busting a union and to create fear and doubt about the union in the workers’ minds.

Remember from Part 1?

“Union busting is a field populated by bullies and built on deceit. A campaign against a union is an assault on individuals and a war on truth. As such, it is a war without honor. The only way to bust a union is to lie, distort, manipulate, threaten and always, always attack.”

Now more from the SUPCOM notes:

We’re doing fine out there. Comments of our demise were greatly exaggerated.

Talks with NATCA – discussions have been on-going. The controller workforce knows very little what is going on regarding politics. All the information the controllers are getting is one sided.

Numerous attempts have been made by the FAA to finish negotiations and sign the contract, so that we can move forward.

FAA will continue to work with NATCA.

NATCA’s upper leadership is currently split.

The FAA offered to significantly increase “New Higher” pay, raise existing pay bands, and increase OJT premium to 15%. But NATCA rejected the offer.

Reauthorization: This will not come to an end until September 09.

Settlement offer: NATCA appeals were all turned down.

Only avenue left for NATCA is to sue the FAA in court. Not sure if they will go that far.

FAA offered to raise the New Higher starting salary and raise the top end of the pay band, but NATCA declined. FAA now countered the offer back to NATCA to give them one last chance.

FAA is looking at raising our mandatory retirement age

NATCA’s OSI/SCI grievance is not going anywhere.

“erratic supervision was a symptom of a diseased organization; the disease spread downward, from a cancer afflicting the top.”

It’s taken years of blogging for a number of people and we still haven’t covered anywhere near all of this one yet.

Still not done yet…

Thought this would be one post, but it looks like another series of posts coming up here for you folks on the Follies.  Hope you’ll bear with me.

As many NATCA members know, recently there have been special meetings around the country where we can listen to our national and regional leadership speak as well as ask questions.  I had the good fortune to attend one recently and based on what I heard, I went and found a copy of an out-of-print book, Confessions of a Union Buster by Martin Jay Levitt with Terry Conrow, published in 1993.

Anyone who doesn’t believe that the Agency has declared war on organized labor with the actions of Bush-appointed lackey, Marion Blakey, and her hired stooges had best wake up and pay attention.  While I refer to NATCA in my posts, I haven’t forgotten the other unions who are fighting the Agency, but I know NATCA best.  As Marty Levitt states in his book:

“Despite vastly different job descriptions, the fundamental interests of employees are strikingly similar.  They all worry about pay and medical insurance; they all wish for fairness, consistency, equity, autonomy, a process for redress of grievances, employment security, health and safety.”

Marty also states (I’ll be quoting Marty a lot):

“I come from a very dirty business…”

“But really the consultants are terrorists….as the consultants go about the business of destroying unions, they invade people’s lives, demolish their friendships, crush their will, and shatter their families.”
 
“But within the field of labor relations the big money is in union busting.”

“I could not have predicted that the field…was one in whose service I would come to routinely dupe frightened managers, rob corporate coffers, betray confidences, and break the law…”

Take a look here at a court case involving Joseph N. Miniace, Blakey’s hired gun, Deputy Assistant Administrator for Human Resource Management (former title of Deputy Assistant Administrator for Strategic Labor Management Relations) and lead negotiator on the FAA’s contract negotiating team.   Pages 5, 6, 18, and 19 are especially interesting.  Mr. Miniace was making in excess of $350,000 per year with perks.  

Remember this, people:

“Union busting is a field populated by bullies and built on deceit.  A campaign against a union is an assault on individuals and a war on truth.  As such, it is a war without honor.  The only way to bust a union is to lie, distort, manipulate, threaten and always, always attack.”

Built on deceit.  Lie, distort, manipulate, threaten and always, always attack.

“Union busters wield great power through their program of terror and manipulation – people don’t, can’t possibly know what’s going on and who’s telling the truth.  You have to appreciate that most of the people [at a workplace] are just regular people.  They in their lives have no experience with violence, with being lied to, with manipulation, and with being harassed in open, gross, insulting ways.  The first time this program happens to regular people, they’re terrified.  Their fondest wish after a few months of this is that it would just go away and go back to being like it was.  The union busters know this.  None of this is intellectual at all.  It works on the gut.”

How many of you have people at your facilities that just wish it would all go away?  That NATCA just accept something to make it stop?  That NATCA just stops fighting altogether?  That maybe the lies the Agency are spreading might actually be true?  It’s funny how early on, before Mr. Levitt’s writing came to light, NATCA came up with the bumper sticker that stated “I believe NATCA”.   Keep believing, folks.

“I was not bound by any code of ethics or any professional canons and therefore would not have to worry about my behavior at the bargaining table.  In fact, for the purposes of my resume, the naughtier I was, the better…..because a charge of surface bargaining is very difficult to substantiate…All I would have to do to defend myself would be to show that I had agreed to something, that some progress had been made.”

Nowadays, surface bargaining is condoned by the Bush-stacked FLRA as “hard bargaining.”

“Where the status quo guidelines did not suit me, I ignored them.”

And another article I found about Mr. Miniace [Note - PMA is the Pacific Maritime Association and ILWU is the International Longshore and Warehouse Union]:

Despite reports in the corporate media weighted in its favor, the PMA is becoming more and more exposed for the union-busting greed behind its lockout of the port workers. In one recent negotiating session with the ILWU, the PMA showed up with gun-toting security guards. Union leaders walked out, saying they would not negotiate with guns in the room.  At the rally, speaker after speaker condemned the threats coming from the Bush administration. Trent Green, a business agent for ILWU Local 10, referred to PMA head Joseph Miniace as “a terrorist because he is attacking our jobs.”

On hearing that Bush had ignored a union offer to go back to work under the old contract for 30 days, invoking Taft-Hartley proceedings instead, ILWU Local 10 president Richard Mead said, “This is what the PMA wanted all along. They didn’t bargain in good faith and they held the economy hostage to force the Bush administration to intervene on their behalf.”

“every act we performed every day was motivated by but one base desire – a lust to dominate.”

“viciousness and insidiousness on the war on unions…under the benign label of ‘union avoidance’”

Another article from 2002:

But on a less-theoretical level, the ILWU says its union-busting case is self-evident, starting with the maritime association itself—particularly the man running it, Joseph Miniace. “He’s a union buster,” says Tacoma’s Lelli, who watched from across town as Charles Hurwitz dismantled Kaiser Aluminum three years ago after similar lockout tactics against steelworkers. “This isn’t [Miniace's] first and won’t be his last. It’s the only reason he was hired. . . . He had no experience in shipping. He had one set of experiences, and he’s using it.”

MINIACE ARRIVED TO run the maritime association in the mid-1990s with a run of successfully attacking unions during confrontations in the health care and airline industries.

“By dragging a union through the plodding legal system, we showed workers that the labor organization was sluggish and inefficient…”

He first came to national labor attention at the maritime association by adopting a new tactic: repeated multimillion-dollar lawsuits against the ILWU and its members for losses from job actions.

“It was a contemptible plan.  But it was a perfect one by the only measure that matters in the war on labor: it worked.”

This 2004 article in the Ivey Business Journal takes a “sympathetic” view of Miniace’s actions.

“In the end I understood that a union-busting campaign left a company financially devastated and hopelessly divided and almost invariably created an even more intolerable work environment than before…”

Marty forgot to add “leaving a morally bankrupt management team.”

More to follow….