I disagree with this reading of the ground rules. I think that the arbitrators could go ahead and set up a group of other arbitrators to rule on grievances and the like.

In reality, that's more or less what they did with the document explaining their decision. Their point in saying "This Panel has the sole power to decide" doesn't preclude that panel from delegating their power to other arbitrators if the caseload gets to be too big.

This is why I didn't really want to get into the whole money thing. The Panel made some choices that are plainly driven by political considerations and real-world expediencies, and there's just no way around it.

Yeah, we're going to wind up with a situation where some people with as much as 4 or 5 years in are making the same amount of money as those newly signed off. Yeah, that seems unfair- but it's a HECK of a lot better than them making considerably more on a pay scale that's more than 30% less than the people that were signed off prior to September of 2006.

But the bigger point is this: The FAA's actions, and the political ideology that lie behind those actions, have been exposed as a fraud and a failure. What they did was flat-out WRONG and to call the White Book any kind of "contract" or "agreement" is plainly a lie.

About damn time someone with some common sense got a hold of this whole thing.

Well, don't get me wrong- I'm still liable to have some dissent. :)

It wouldn't surprise me a bit to see the proposed contract fail to ratify due to anger over the lack of any "make-whole". The panel's language seems to reject "looking back" and instead looks to the future, but I think a lot of people are still pretty bent out of shape over the whole thing.

I'm not urging people to focus on the past with my post, but I am definitely telling them to REMEMBER that past and remember how their employer (dis)respected them in this whole matter.

I hope my brethren in the AF field, and indeed throughout the FAA, get a fair process.

There's a lot of people at work right now who are NOT particularly happy with how this turned out. Many are not fully understanding that this isn't something we get a say in or a vote on at this point.

I am trying to remind them all, though, that this is what we've asked for the entire time- a reasonably fair process that, if we can't come to agreement, puts it into the hands of a fair panel that will make the decision.

You guys in PASS deserve nothing less than this same process, and indeed even the FAA's own propaganda (as opposed to the fine propaganda we have here at the Follies!) indicates that this process will be used in the future for union matters in the agency. Of course, if/when Congress passes the FAA reauthorization bill, it will cement this type of process into the law; right now the FAA's promise to use this process can change based on who's in charge of the agency.

Train... I think it depends on where you worked and who you worked with. I know that the ex-PATCO guy that worked in my area was a dedicated NATCA member who didn't hold any hard feelings towards any of the post-strike hires.

Now, the guys who were hired pre-strike and still working when he got rehired? Them, he hated. With good reason, if you think about it. If more of them had gone out, it might have worked.

Of course, the vast majority of pre-strike hires that were still working in the FAA over the past 5 to 10 years were (by this time) supervisors and managers.

Write something! Whaddya got for news?

The NATCA election... not really interested in covering that for the Follies, myself. Oh, I'll write another endorsement of Ruth. I don't know either of the Central guys well enough to endorse there (and what a tight race that is!)

I think NATCA's in a bit of a holding pattern right now, waiting for the pay arbitration thing to be announced... we'll see some stuff around the election runoff... but then there'll be a bit of a break as we gather together and move forward.

Locally, we're having an election too, and that's taking up more than a bit of my time since I'm running for FacRep.

Sorry this was late- I screwed up in setting the time/date stamp for posting.

Actually, I think the idea is that the contract will wind up being cancelled entirely. We'll see.

One thing that I don't think the FAA considered, or that is considered very much, is that when you contract out a service like this, if you don't have incredibly strong controls to ensure that the service level is maintained or greater, the you're building in a situation where the contractor actually has an incentive to do a LOUSY job.

See, say you're a giant corporation that makes all its money via government contracts. A governmental agency decides to contract out a service that they spend $1 billion a year doing. You bid for it at $750 million a year. The service consists of doing something for free that people could also do for themselves, but when the government staffers do it, they do a pretty good job, so people choose to have the staffer do it instead of doing it themselves. (Either way, it's free to them.)

Now, if you keep doing the same quality job that the government is doing, then people will likely keep using your service.

But your incentive is to NOT have people do your service. In fact, the more people choose to do it for themselves via the free option, the less money you have to spend providing the service, and the more PROFIT you make.

So from your company's point of view, you kind of WANT your people to do a crappy job. When they do, they drive customers away, and you make more money.

That's the situation we have right now with FSS.

What the FAA should have done is instead of setting up a fixed-price contract (which is still better than cost-plus, where the corporation has no incentive to control costs AND wants to get as many customers as possible) is set up a hybrid contract where there's a cap on what the government will pay- set the cap at, say, 85% of the old total costs- but it's also got a firm per-task price built in.

So if it used to cost the government 1 dollar per time they provided the service, the corporation can only get 85 cents per time they provide the service.

This way, the corporation's motivation will be to both give the service as much as possible so they maximize profit (meaning they want to do a good job to keep those customers coming to them) AND if the corporation does a lousy job, there's no payoff for them (fewer customers = less profit).

The situation we have now, Lockheed makes the most money by doing such a terrible job that nobody wants briefings anymore, so they quit doing it with FSS.

Note that this doesn't mean that the actual staffers DOING the briefings are necessarily doing a crappy job. They might want to do a really good job (and I think that most of the FSS folks DO want to do a great job). But the corporation sets them up into situations where as a company, they'll fail.

There's not enough staff. The equipment they use doesn't work well. They don't train as much as they could. They don't staff properly for busy times. Stuff like that... and stuff that we're seeing with Lockheed doing the flight service contract.

Hmmm... well, we're lucky in that regard at ZSE. Our CICs regularly approve leave if it's within the guidelines. (Which is probably the key- if our CICs were regularly shorting shifts, they'd put an end to allowing us to approve leave.)

In fact, often the CICs are the only ones who are actively looking at the schedule over the next several days and ensuring that every leave request that COULD be approved is actually granted. I know that whenever I get the desk (yeah, I do CIC duties if asked/assigned) I will go through and frequently find spots where someone should have gotten their leave. I make the phone calls, let people know they can have the shift off after all, make shift changes as people request it, etc.

If, in the order, a CIC is allowed to approve leave, then they should exercise that right/ability to the maximum they can while still being responsible about it. That doesn't mean we should go hogwild and take a shift down to well below the guidelines, but it does mean we should ensure that it's done properly.

And if they try to punish you for it, call 'em out on it. Likewise, if you know a controller is abusing it when they're CIC, call THEM out for it, too.

I didn't say it was more DIFFICULT. I said it has greater responsibility.

In theory, anyway, the FAA treats the "IC" position (whether it's a CIC, or a FLMIC) as having more responsibility. They look at it as though the CIC/FLMIC is "in charge" of the entire area or tower cab or tracon. If an error occurs on any ONE of the control positions that the CIC/FLMIC is responsible for, the IC person is supposedly responsible for it, and has to answer for it.

We all know the reality- FLMs are almost never seriously cited on error reports as being contributory factors and certainly not as causal factors. They're also not held responsible for it in term of disciplinary issues. We had an error some years back at ZSE where we had an OM who was basically the supe-in-charge for a shift. He left to take a leak, then swung by the vending machines to grab a sandwich to bring back.

They had a deal while he was gone... and he hadn't left anyone in charge. Didn't tell anyone where he was going, either- just took a PIREP up to the desk and didn't come back for a while. When the snitch went off, phone rang and rang and finally the OM comes down and yeah, we had one, and where the hell is the supe?

End result? Absolutely nothing happened to the guy, not mentioned in the deal report, no internal consequences.

I totally agree that the vast majority of the time, the mediocre and bad supes are doing little more than just sitting there answering the phone and surfing the web and chit-chatting with people. The reality is that the FAA doesn't take the responsibility of the IC position seriously.

But the FAA's position is hypocritical; they declare that they MUST have FLMs in that role as much as possible, yet they don't pay CICs any differential when they're in charge. If it truly doesn't have any extra responsibility, why not dump about 40% or 50% of the staffing levels of the FLMs, increase the staffing guidelines and levels of the controllers, leave CICs all the time, and just let the FLMs handle signoffs, tape talks, and that paperwork crap?

Answer: The FAA is totally hypocritical about the actual requirements of the position. They always want it both ways- added "responsibility" (in theory, anyway) and therefore required additional management staffing, yet no additional pay for controllers. FLMs get way better leave availabililty than controllers, but controllers are required to cover for those absences. (We get into that in tomorrow's post.)