NEW MEC Grievance Filed Challenging Management’s Right to Assign you New Flying When No Flying is Lost.  We NEED You to Help Us Gather the Evidence!

Yet one more time, we find ourselves fighting the battle to enforce parameters during which the Company may assign you new flying which is not part of your scheduled sequence.  The thought that we are individual Joan of Arcs or Davids fighting Goliath sometimes seems very familiar.

Previously, AFA arbitrated two grievances during which the arbitrators were clear!  NEW flying may only be assigned when one of two things has occurred . . . either (1) something happens to your sequence such that you cannot fly all the flights plotted or (2) the entire system has been disrupted such that all flight schedules are a mess (referred to by the arbitrator as a “hell in a handbasket” scenario).

Nonetheless, American Eagle still wants to do whatever is convenient at the moment.  We have tried to resolve this dispute informally.  After discussing this issue at several meetings of the AFA & Management Joint Implementation (of the collective bargaining agreement) Committee Meetings, no resolution has been reached. 

Consequently, we have filed MEC Grievance 22-99-2-79-06 on June 14, 2006 challenging these conditional parameters identified in the two System Board awards as Sections 8.D.2. and 8.D.4 of the current collective bargaining agreement.

AFA believes that something must happen to your trip before you can be assigned new flying. In other words, some trigger must occur which causes you to lose some or all of your flying. Examples of lost flying may be, but are not limited to, cancellations for weather or maintenance or misconnects. It should be noted that this grievance does not cover Reserve Fight Attendants when they are on active Reserve Availability status, but it does apply to Reserve Flight Attendants while flying trips picked up on their time off.

The Company seems to believe they can give you an assignment to any flying at any time solely for Crew Scheduling’s convenience - even if nothing has happened to your original trip!  Eagle believes its only obligation is to attempt to get you back on your original sequence as soon as possible. We have pointed out this essentially places the entire Flight Attendant population into Reserve or “on call” status, without regard to seniority based bidding and awarding system of assigning flying.

Should you be assigned new flying when nothing has happened to your original trip, we need the following documents.  Please provide them to a Local Union Representative. Should this dispute end up in arbitration and the Association prevails, you could be entitled to relief.  If you do end up entitled to some relief, we will need that documentation to identify you as one of the eligible Flight Attendants.

Documents we Need

1.      Copy of your original trip.

2.       Copy of the altered trip.

3.       Copy of the “NS” list, showing who actually worked your originally scheduled flying in your place.

4.       Written explanation of the events that took place on the date you were assigned the new flying when you didn’t lose any original flying.