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.