Negotiation Committee Members:
Mitch Hunt - DEN
Dave Mahood - EWR
Blake Silverstein - IAD
Dexter Thomas - IAH
Scott Stoddart - LAX
Mike Blomquist - MCO
Mike Pecoraro - ORD
Joseph Prisco - SFO
John Laurin - SFO
Your IBT Negotiating Committee met at Local 769 in Miami the week of December 4, 2023.
We started the week with your Benefits Committee to discuss Article 16 and how we can reduce benefit costs to our members across the board. As discussed at several system meetings, it is our fiduciary responsibility to determine whether TeamCare is an option that we should explore as one of the ways to reduce overall benefits costs to all members.
With that in mind, TeamCare gave us a presentation as to what they can offer our members in reducing the costs of our benefits while improving the overall maintenance of benefits. They gave us a comparison of benefits and costs to give us a preliminary idea of whether they could provide the membership with the cost savings we were looking for. When they finished with their presentation, the benefit and negotiating committees discussed what was presented and then the negotiating committee voted to task the benefit committee with continuing discussions with TeamCare as an option, and to bring back a proposal to the negotiation committee. Reducing Benefits costs was one of the top issues that the members brought up in the survey that needed to be addressed in negotiations.
The afternoon of December 5, your negotiating committee discussed Article 17 “Overtime”. We discussed “will work letters” (a method to auto accept overtime) and job continuation. We also talked about overtime bypasses being an issue and solutions to keep bypasses low and to make sure the system is more constant in application with local issues being addressed by utilizing paragraph J with “Overtime” guidelines.”
Wednesday, December 6, we started with our attorneys, Josh McInnerney and Emily Pantoja, to go over Article 19, “Grievance and Disciplinary Procedures,” and Article 20, “Arbitration.”
We went line by line to change what is broken or not working the way we believe it should work to better protect our members. We went over several solutions to improve the grievance process so our member’s issues are resolved per the agreement. Our attorneys will firm up the changes and return the articles to us and add them to other articles that will be part of our full pass to the company.
We finished the week with a Zoom call with our IBT Economist Kyle Schoembs to go over our wage components and where we are now as compared with other carriers and where we all be through 2026.
Finally, the section 6 notification has been filed and acknowledged by the company. The union is looking for dates in January to meet with the company.
Your IBT Negotiating Committee