Airport Standby to Receive Credit of 3:45 for Time Balancing

By Eric Brahm, MEC Scheduling Chair

Starting in July, reserve flight attendants assigned airport standby will be given credit for their time as Ready RSV.  The credit will be for time balancing purposes only and will not affect actual pay.  The Standby FA will receive the greater of; the value of a day (3:45), or the actual time flown.  There will be a new article posted sometime in June, on the Inflight page of Jetnet explaining how the system will function with this change.

In the last contract negotiations, the company wanted time balancing.  The union pushed for proffering.  We ended up with a system that combines the two principles.  Unfortunately they are often contradictory and the system doesn't function well.  Aware that we'll be in negotiations soon and hopeful that we could make small changes that will help direct us towards a better system in the new contract, the members of the CIC looked at various alternatives.  For now, we were constrained in this effort by the current contract, cost, and ease of use of whatever changes we could develop.

We looked at the reserve systems of many other airlines, both regional and mainline, in an effort to find alternatives that could improve our system.  In the end, we decided to start by assigning credit for time spent as Ready RSV.  It didn't seem reasonable to us that the person sitting at home on RAP and the person who spent 8 hours at the airport were credited equally. This hopefully will be a more accurate reflection of work being done.  It will create movement on the RSV list that at present doesn't exit.  Since assignments with a credited value are awarded first, people at the top of the list will now be able to preference for either any open trip or any open standby position.  Thus if you are at the top of the list and would prefer to sit standby, you will now be able to do so.  This change shouldn't have much effect on the first day of the month which will still be done by seniority.  Everyone will start the first day at zero and the credit for standby won't accrue till the shift has ended.