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This week was a proud milestone in or Union’s history. The arbitration for the 11 fired controllers from New York TRACON finally came to an end. The FAA, after stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the vile wrongness of their position had their collective sixes handed to them. The cliff-notes version; the 11 are returning to work tomorrow lead back by John Carr along with other leaders, activists and supporters. But the story goes much deeper than that.
* It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong – Voltaire *
You’re employer, as a policy extension of the White House management agenda, took it upon themselves to attempt to wrongly destroy the lives and livelihoods of these controllers and their families. Their reason? To usher along their desired “culture change” which they even admitted under cross examination. I hope the transcripts are out soon but the Agency spent hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to put these poor souls on the pointy end of their intimidation spear. Fortunately for us, the Union got an opportunity to present these cases in front of a neutral arbitrator which allowed us, in spite of (or more accurately because of, since they made our case under cross examination) a parade of Agency witnesses (which read like a “Who’s Who” in the FAA), to highlight in sharp relief how totally unjustifiable and manically inappropriate their position was. But what the hell, reason, common decency and operational stewardship don’t seem to be ideas in particular vogue within the leadership of this agency nowadays, as witnessed in events across the nation. So why is the legislative guy talking about wrongful discipline cases? It all ties together;
Remember Congress? That’s the folks who, at least in a statutory sense, ride herd over the FAA telling them what is appropriate to do. An interesting word “appropriate” since the muscle that backs up Congresses guidance is that they control the purse strings of the Agency’s funding through a process called “appropriations”. Aside from all the other issues we deal with Congress over, the case of the above NY11 was something we brought Congress in early on. Many interested members of Congress from both parties inquired of the Agency their reasoning and intentions on these cases. To a person, they were all told that the Agency intended to mitigate this and they certainly weren’t going to “fire” these people. That took the wind out of our sails a bit until … surprise surprise … the Agency fired them all! That enraged a good many members of Congress but a few, somewhat justifiably couldn’t grasp that the FAA would just flat out lie to them like that and their must be more to the story than NATCA was letting on. Then the Agency failed in a most miserably spectacular fashion to even offer a shred of justification for their callous and egregious actions at the arbitration hearings, motivating them to quickly enter settlement talks after realizing their exposure. The story is still getting out to our lawmakers but the responses I have gotten so far range from disbelief to fury (in fact, the agency has been giving a collective foxtrot uniform to Congress on a number of issues). This segues in to;
* If they can get you to ask the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers *
The Agency has been cutting loose with a stream of press releases and events characterizing its own workforce as lazy, inefficient, overpaid and obstructionist. Most of this has ranged from misleading to outright falsehoods. A few short examples in reference to contract negotiations being: citing grossly over-exaggerated salary figures as the norm for this profession, insinuating we will be going on strike, claiming we are asking for raises. These and other attempts initially got the focus off of the facts but things are starting to turn. I believe a majority of Congress now sees this for what it is and recognizes the Agency’s disingenuous efforts. They would also be willing to address this, I believe, if the FAA succeeds in their not so secret strategy to avoid good faith bargaining by instead gerrymandering an “impasse” so as to send their desires to Congress. Here’s the rub; even if a majority of Congress sees what’s going on and wants to address it, the small handful of people in the majority party who control the agenda in Congress are beholden to the White House and its desire not to have its so called management agenda weakened. For the rank and file members to insist this be addressed, they need the justification of not just doing what is right but also the political cover of responding to the requests of a significant number of their own constituents. This then leads us to;
Fly Us Safe: Starting on a bright note, I’d like to congratulate Scot Morrison of LNK and Mike O’Conner of ALO for their leadership in raising their respective facilities to the newest members of the Central Region 100% club. Great job guys!
On a lesser note, this campaign has been going on since late September and we only have 59% of our region’s membership who have taken a lousy two to three minutes out of their time to save their own profession. This whole thing isn’t a Union vs. Management or a member vs. non-member or left vs. right thing. It really isn’t even a controller thing. It’s an Air Traffic thing. Each of our jobs hang in the balance and the safety and integrity of the system, I believe, is at a crossroads dependant upon the events of the next few months. Please take just a few moments to log in to www.flyussafe.com and then take another minute to call 1-877-FlyUsSafe and let your Senators know this is important.
Below are the numbers on the email campaign by facility. We really need to hear more from CID and ZKC.
Call me with any questions,
Grant Anderson 417-894-6887
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