The FAA Follies

At my facility, we’ve been receiving mandatory training on the Air Traffic Organization’s (ATO’s) “Spirit of Performance”. Thus far, it’s included three videos that we’re required to watch with our supervisor and “have a dialogue” on what we’ve viewed and our thoughts on what we’ve seen. The absolute best thing I can say about these videos is that the music is much more palatable than we are usually subjected to in a FAA video.  Spirit of Performance’s acronym of SOP, in my opinion, is a not-so-subtle attempt to give it some unconscious importance in the minds of the workforce as most of us, correctly, associate the acronym SOP with Standard Operating Procedures.

The links to the videos are to where the FAA posted them on YouTube.  They’ve been online from 4-7 months and as of this writing have received a total of less than 1400 hits.  Wonder where the hit count will be in a couple weeks.

The first of these videos was “ATO Customer Service.” 6 minutes and 29 seconds of my life I won’t get back….twice, since I viewed it again on my personal time for my own edification. In my original briefing, it seemed to me that the word “customer” was used quite a bit, so I watched again to find that the word was used 20 times. That’s an average of once every 20 seconds or so.  However, variants of the word “safe” (safer, safest, safely, safety), only occurred 10 times.  Over the course of all three videos, the word “customer” was used almost twice as often as those variants of “safe.”

In the video, Steve Osterdahl, states, “The customer, for us, in the purest sense of the word, is the people that fly the airplanes.” Perhaps Steve is unfamiliar with Section 332 of HR915 FAA Reauthorization Act of 2009. (Note: this legislation is in committee in the House.)

SEC. 332. MODIFICATION OF CUSTOMER SERVICE INITIATIVE.

(b) Modification of Initiative- Not later than 90 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration shall modify the customer service initiative, mission and vision statements, and other statements of policy of the Agency–

(1) to remove any reference to air carriers or other entities regulated by the Agency as `customers’;
(2) to clarify that in regulating safety the only customers of the Agency are individuals traveling on aircraft; and
(3) to clarify that air carriers and other entities regulated by the Agency do not have the right to select the employees of the Agency who will inspect their operations.

(c) Safety Priority- In carrying out the Administrator’s responsibilities, the Administrator shall ensure that safety is given a higher priority than preventing the dissatisfaction of an air carrier or other entity regulated by the Agency with an employee of the Agency.

The Agency’s errant “customer” focus has been blogged here before on the Follies in an excellent post by Publius, another by BEB and mentioned in the comments section here, so I’m not going to say much about it all, except to note that despite the beatings the FAA has taken from the public, media and Congress about their “customer” focus, they are still pushing the concept at the workforce…making it mandatory training.  I’ve been around the block a few times so I recognize the training for what it really is, but since those of us who’ll be leaving the Agency in the next 6 or 7 years aren’t really the Agency’s “target audience,” it may have its desired effect here or there with some of the newbies…getting them to bypass their union in the name of “customer service.”

Video #2 was ATO Focus on the Future. A couple of interesting quotes here:

And you, the ATO workforce, MUST adapt.

We MUST embrace and enable NextGen technologies and we MUST plan for facilities and workforce changes.

Hank Krakowski, who has been in his position about a year and a half, says:

Look forward to working with you to make it happen.

One of my most passionate goals is to try to reset the atmosphere between labor and management here within FAA.

One of the real opportunities we have, though, is that we’re going to be replacing almost all of our controller workforce and many FAA people in general over the next 10 years.  It would be a tragedy and a management failure, in my opinion, if we just take those new employees and replicate the environment that we currently have.

Hank has had some time to attempt to work with us to make it happen and to start making inroads in reaching “one of his most passionate goals”…and has fallen short time and time again.  The Agency has hired about 20-25% of the people they’re going to need to replace those controllers that have retired or will retire in the coming years, yet they’re being indoctrinated in the “environment that we currently have.”  Start your attitude adjustments within your management ranks, Hank, because management is failing bigtime.  Of course, Hank’s “resetting the atmosphere” comment may actually refer to busting the various unions so that employees are dealing with management individually and make it easier for management to ignore their employees’ concerns and bulldoze ahead with their less-than-clearly-stated plans.

Interestingly enough, during Hank’s discussion of SWIM – System Wide Information Management, he goes on to say how the deployment of ASDE-X has aided management with SWIM by giving them real-time information on aircraft locations.  (Note: the second link is to Harris, who’s been bringing us FTI.) Funny, he never mentions that NATCA was pushing for ASDE-X to be deployed for immediate gains in safety at least as early as 2001 and that only after the Agency was publicly embarrassed by NATCA in 2005 did they decide to revisit their decision to scrap some of the deployments. The Agency is still behind on many modernization projects, but maybe we’ll start seeing some more ASDE-X installations, now that management can use it for their own purposes.  Obviously, runway safety was not a good enough reason.

Video #3 is ATO Your Contribution. Hank says about NextGen that the Agency has spent the “last 6 years planning it, now it’s time to implement it.” Perhaps, Hank should inform the workforce…or Congress…what exactly NextGen is – the exact components that will be implemented and why. I heard that the Agency will be “redeploying assets and people in the system”. Must be talking about all those realignments, consolidations and collocations that the Agency is planning without transparency or actual data to back up supposed cost savings or consideration of the negative effects on safety. Oh, Hank, guess what?  If you really want to “reset the atmosphere between labor and management,” you might want to start including the primary stakeholders in your plans…the unions representing the various workforces.

The video caused me (being low on the workforce totem pole and all) some confusion. At one point, it says to hear what “your colleagues” have to say, but all said individuals speaking were members of management, not my colleagues. Then at the end, it suggests “be adaptable and accept feedback.” Now, does that mean that management should be adaptable and accept feedback from the workforce (unions)? Or that the workforce should be adaptable and accept feedback from management?

My feedback to my supervisor was that he really didn’t want my feedback…the Agency has made that abundantly clear to me over the last few years.  When my union has a real place at the table, I’ll be happy to consider working, as a union representative, toward making the Agency’s nebulous, undefined vision(s) of NextGen a safe, workable reality.  Otherwise, color me unimpressed, uninterested and to do no more than the minimum.  Unless, of course, it involves highlighting the Agency’s continued failures publicly.

I mentioned yesterday that it seems to me that there have been a higher number of individuals leaving the controller ranks to join management than usual.  Outside of those on the B pay scale wanting to get onto the A scale like they were originally planning on (and I really don’t get that from an activist’s point of view), I personally can’t understand why anyone would do so after being on the receiving end of management’s union-busting tactics and metaphorical boots on our necks.  Then I received an unexpected phone call from a former coworker who’d become a supervisor before the IWRs – someone who long ago was a NATCAvist.  And I heard the union-busting spiel.

• “NATCA should be encouraging people to move into management, not holding them back.”
• “Make the change from the other side.”
• “You’re too smart to just be a controller.”
• “You should already be a manager at your own facility.”
• “Other than the pay, what’s really so bad about the white book?”
• “Management is just taking back its rights.”
• “Anyone who has been a controller for more than 15 years without moving up is a bitter, mean individual.”
• “The best way to set yourself up for a contractor’s job after retirement is to have some DC experience.”
• “You gotta do what’s right financially for your family.”

There was more, but you get the idea.  It was difficult to hear such nonsense coming from someone I had once respected.  It was more difficult to realize how many people are accepting that nonsense as so-called reasonableness and jumping ship.

A couple of personal thoughts on the spiel:

I see no reason to accept anything management has to say that includes the phrase “NATCA should be doing” as anything but self-serving.

On the other side, I wouldn’t have the protections, even reduced as they are under the IWRs, that I have as a bargaining unit employee.

On the other side, I wouldn’t have the freedom to speak my mind and make those changes.  Remember St. Louis?  Management’s way or the highway?

“Just be a controller” really does say it all about how they see us, doesn’t it?

There is a great deal of concern that Obama’s support of workers in this country will lead to our economic downfall.  Business groups maintain the Employee Free Choice Act is an affront to democratic principles and hurt job growth.  Even lawyers are weighing in expecting greater business in the coming years.

Big business seems to think that their own employees making a living wage, receiving decent benefits and having a real say in their workplace is undemocratic and unreasonable.  No one knows better what their job entails than the worker.  No one is more invested personally than a worker who believes their employer truly considers their input valuable.  Why wouldn’t an employer want to keep their employees safe in the workplace and provide protective equipment?  Why wouldn’t an employer want their employees to have decent health insurance?  Why wouldn’t an employer wish to invest in its best, most useful resource to keep them in prime operating condition?

One of our new hires recently made a comment to me that made me feel old…very old.  From what I can gather (and I have no idea why anyone would deliberately pass along such erroneous information), someone had told said new hire that the green book had been around since the PATCO days.  New hire was also told that they were not entitled to union representation in the workplace until the one-year probationary period had expired; which is untrue, we just can’t grieve removals within the probationary period.

New hire obviously received the correct information from me.  But it reinforced my belief that we need to be doing more to teach the newest generation of workers and potential union activists of their rights and what tricks management and management wannabes will use to undermine the union’s purpose.

Big business is afraid of the perceived power of unions.  Unions don’t hire and fire; they only attempt to ensure that the employer applies the same, objective criteria to everyone while taking steps to ensure workers stay safe and receive a living wage.  That really isn’t an unreasonable goal and shouldn’t be an issue for an employer, should it?

Obama’s election created a collective sigh of relief for labor proponents.   Hope is on the immediate horizon.  But the war is not over; it will never be over.  The battles may become non-existent or easier for a time, but the war will be simmering below the surface and we should always be prepared for a sneak attack.  So long as big business believes that profit and their own self-perceived sense of power are more important than the safety and well-being of its workers, there is always the risk of being out-flanked.

This is extremely important for us controllers to realize and guard against.  Look at our history thus far.  PATCO, building management’s ranks, strike, NATCA, building management’s ranks, IWRs, building management’s ranks.  All these new supervisors are being indoctrinated in the same self-defeating style of management that PATCO struck against and that caused NATCA to form.  NATCA continues to rally against it, but our veteran ranks are retiring.  A lot of that fire and knowledge isn’t being passed on to our newest generation.

If we learn anything from the IWRs, it is that the resentment in the FAA management ranks against controllers is alive and well and being taught to their newest generation.  Our newest controller generation needs to understand, deep to their bones, that as bad as it is now, it can and will get worse if they’re not prepared enough, strong enough, unified enough to stand against it.  Complacency and the expectation that someone else will take care of it for them will not work.  They need to remain ever vigilant.  Those veterans who are still left need to take the time and expend the energy to pass along, not only our ATC knowledge, but our knowledge of  labor management relations, dirty tricks management uses, and the rhetoric they spout.

I bet if BEB could figure out a way to get this series to automatically post again in 10 or 15 years, the basic premises I’ve mentioned will be as applicable then as they are today.  What say you?

As I write this, it has been 866 days without a ratified contact for the controller workforce.  A number of unions, federal and private sector, are feeling hopeful that the inauguration of Barack Obama next week will mark the beginning of a significant, positive change in the history of labor in this country and truly eradicate the worst of the residual effects of Reagan firing the PATCO controllers in 1981.  We saw bits of this positive change during the Clinton administration, but under GWB, the entire country, not just organized labor, suffered – and still suffers – greatly.

I originally envisioned this post to be solely about Obama’s plans to cut middle management in government and was researching numbers.  It seems that there have been an increasing number of supervisory bids since the imposition of the Imposed Work Rules (IWRs) and I wanted to see what those numbers actually showed.  I found some interesting ones that I’ll share, but a few other thoughts have been rolling around in my cranium that I think need to be said and they all are related my final conclusion, so this might end up being another two-part series for you readers so that I can get them out into the general blogosphere.

But first, let’s look at numbers.  I couldn’t find an exact number of supervisors and controllers in 1981 at the time of the PATCO strike.  All I found was this letter to the editor of the New York Times which mentions a combined number of supervisors and staff specialists which leads me to believe that the ratio of controllers to supervisors probably averaged somewhere between 9:1 to 10:1.

For more current numbers I checked the FAA Administrator’s Fact Book.  I don’t know why it still amazes me that their own numbers aren’t consistent, but I’ll use the data from the December 2006 book for fiscal year 2004 (FY2004).  The FAA’s data says they had 14,736 controllers and 1,722 supervisors.  That’s a ratio of 8.55 controllers to 1 supervisor.

Those who have been in the Agency might recall that part of the premise for reclass was that controllers would pick up more Controller-in-Charge duties and the Agency would let the supervisory ranks to attrit to a ratio closer of 10:1.  Reclass was in 1996; contract in 1998.

In June 2002, the (GAO) submitted this report to Congress – Air Traffic Control:  FAA Needs to Better Prepare for Impending Wave of Controller Attrition. The GAO’s numbers for FY2000 are 15,120 controllers and 1,862.  A ratio of 8.12 controllers to 1 supervisor.

More from the report:

Rather, FAA’s strategy for replacing controllers is generally to hire new controllers only when current, experienced controllers leave….For example, FAA’s hiring process does not adequately take into account the potential increases in future hiring and the time necessary to fully train replacements. (page 4)

Ultimately, FAA’s ability to successfully plan and manage this situation will dictate its overall impact on the nation’s air traffic control system and the safety and efficiency of air travel in the United States. (page 43; emphasis added)

FAA estimates by 2010, it will need about 2,000 more controllers than are presently employed to handle future increases in air traffic. (page 5)

And from page 22…and the FAA’s own numbers as they provided to the GAO, the Agency was supposedly planning to have 16,836 controllers in 2008.  Oh, one more tidbit from the same table; in 2003, they were projecting to have 15,606 controllers as per the negotiated agreement with NATCA.

From the FAA Administrator’s Fact Book:  As of June 30, 2008, the Agency has 15,308 controllers (which clearly states that the total includes individuals in the Academy and trainees not certified on anything yet).  1,857 supervisors for a ratio of 8.24 controllers to 1 supervisor.

I threw a lot of numbers out there, but in essence, there are a couple things that are worthy of note.  One, the Agency had already reneged on its agreement(s) with NATCA about controller staffing…long before the IWRs.  There were supposed to have 15,606 controllers onboard in 2003…but as of 2008 – five years later, they’re still 300 short of that number (having never reached that number at all).  They were supposed to let the supervisory ranks attrit, yet the ratio of controllers to supervisors increased from 2002 to 2004.  In fairness, it did decrease in 2005, but has been rising ever since.

Two, the Agency pretty much gave the GAO and Congress the proverbial finger and didn’t attempt to address the recommendations in that 2002 report until 5 years later.  The Agency didn’t start hiring trainees until people had retired; they didn’t even attempt to plan for retirements at individual facilities until 2007 when the IWRs started a larger wave of retirements (as predicted by NATCA) than the Agency was prepared for.

Three, the Agency obviously couldn’t even adequately plan for their OWN recommendations and projected needs.  Remember the numbers they gave GAO for 2008?  16,836…and there are 15,606.  Not even close, FAA.

Seems to me that thus far, the Agency has unsuccessfully planned and managed this situation – partly because of incompetence, partly because of its union-busting agenda – and the negative impact on the nation’s air traffic control system and the safety and efficiency of air travel in the United States has yet to be fully felt by the flying public.  Controllers have been feeling it now for two years and we know no immediate end is in sight.

To be continued…

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….

A confluence of ideas somehow merged into this post and I hope you’ll bear with me as I meander through it all.  There are two main thoughts which you may or may not agree with, but this time around I’m writing about themes that have far less to do with the FAA itself than it does with our reactions to the Agency’s continued malfeasance and its acute hatred for its employees.

First was BEB’s recent Fatigued post, which hit home since I know I feel the fatigue.  Second was John Carr’s Mythbusters post.  You see, I know John never undermined the contract team, but I also know neither has Pat.  Both wanted and still want a ratifiable contract.  Third was a dinner table conversation (we don’t get nearly enough of those with our schedules) I had with my non-ATC husband about it all.

My husband is very much aware of how long the IWRs have been in effect, the toll the Agency’s been taking on each of its bargaining units and the flying public and the Agency’s increasing disregard for the safety of the system in the interests of money and golden parachutes.  He’s also living (and dealing) with a spouse who spends a great deal of what should be her non-waking hours working on NATCA stuff and isn’t always as good as she should be about handling the stress of her work environment when she is home.  So hubby wanted to get my opinions on why the disconnect in the union seems to be heating up again. 

I explain to him the frustration of the workforce, at all levels, at the continued lack of accountability in the FAA’s management structure.  The fact that it’s been a year and a half and we’re not feeling concrete progress in getting it corrected is increasing, not decreasing the anger.  But what it boils down to is a basic difference in attitudes within the workforce.  Those of us who are still fighting daily in the trenches want to be swinging hard.  Give us some metaphorical blackjacks and some ice picks to use so when the Agency steps on our necks, we can hit back immediately wherever we can reach and hopefully open up some more areas that we can pound on.  

We focus on the wrongs that have already been committed and need to be corrected, but are continuing to occur and try to keep the wrongs from increasing.  If we end up losing the battle, we want to have the satisfaction of knowing we bloodied some faces, broken some bones and damaged some nerves along the way. 

Many of us would welcome the knock-down, drag-out, in-your-face fight for all to see.  We want Agency heads to roll and we want to be the ones playing kick-the-can with those same heads.  We want to make it too painful for the Agency to keep every inch of hurt they’ve been inflicting on us.  We’ll stay within the designated lines, but we want to be pushing those lines further and further out to regain our territory and give better protection to our people.

On the other hand, you have those in the workforce that are more civilized about it all and don’t want to get their business-casual outfits wrinkled.  I’m not talking about the members fighting quietly, but consistently (and in a more “business-like” way) at every turn, but those who expect others to do the fighting.  Those that won’t take what they consider unnecessary risks - the Agency might inflict worse wrongs upon us.  Those who worry more about appearances than fact.  Those who haven’t had any LMR training and are afraid that they’ll make a mistake and make it worse.  Those who don’t want to rock the boat, who don’t want to be noticed, don’t want to be labeled a troublemaker.  Unfortunately, the Agency has been somewhat successful in creating an atmosphere of fear in our workplaces.

My local is a microcosm (in reverse) of what’s perceived to be happening within the union.  I’m in the first group and the majority of my local is in the second group.  So I have to temper my street-fighting instincts to keep it more civilized, which creates additional stress and fatigue.  It’s difficult to be fighting for people (and sometimes arguing with the same people about strategy and tactics) who won’t pick up a rock and join the fight. 

Hubby had an interesting take on the “ratifiable contract.”  He said that every controller that has elected to retire, every newbie that has elected to quit, every controller that continues fighting in big or small ways (pushing the limits of the dress code, not going out of their way to run traffic at minimum separation, freezing out management, talking to and writing Congress, reporting management errors, filing NASA reports, filing grievances, filing ULPs, filing EEO complaints, filing OSC complaints, etc.) has, in essence, voted “no” on the IWRs.  But those who turn the other cheek, burrow deeper in the sand in the hopes of staying under the radar, don’t get involved in the fight, who won’t stand up for themselves have, again in essence, voted “yes” on the IWRs.  My husband is a one smart individual.

For every Congressional type, every member of the flying public (aviation-related or not), for every Agency employee that reads this, be very aware that each moment the Agency is left unchecked and not held accountable in any meaningful way is another moment closer to irrevocable harm to the NAS.   The anger is deep, it’s real and it’s solely based upon the actions of the Agency in the last couple years. 

They have deliberately, with malice and forethought, gone out of their way to create work environments laced with fear and intimidation under the guise of “running it like a business”.  They’re running amok with their koolaid-induced visions of power.  They are feathering their nests and packing their golden parachutes for a nice soft landing with a contractor instead of taking care of the business of aviation safety.  What are you going to do about it? 

I know what I see clearly reflected in my mirror.  Do you?