Negotiations

Final JCBA Proposals Submitted

Final JCBA Proposals Submitted

February 16, 2021

Late last night, per the Protocol Agreement requirement, the final JCBA (Joint Collective Bargaining Agreement) proposals were exchanged between the union, comprised of Local 2750 representing the Atlas pilots and Local 1224 representing the Southern pilots, and the company Atlas Air. The exchange happened late last night as the company was making final adjustments to their proposal.

Sometime before the scheduled 11-day arbitration hearing, which is set to begin on March 17, 2021, the proposals will be submitted to the Arbitrator, Mr. Dana Eischen. From there, the CBA asks the arbitrator to issue the award 60 days after the beginning of the arbitration hearings, which again is March 17, 2021.

While we are still reviewing the documents, going into arbitration, the company is proposing Kalitta pay rates for the B-747 and below Kalitta pay rates for the B-777, B-767, and B-737. A 1% increase in retirement pay, offset by a reduction in medical benefits and 17 days of work per month. We will have more details as we have time to more thoroughly sort through all the documents we received late last night.

Let me refresh your memory as to how contract negotiations have gone over the past year or so. In a nutshell, while the company constantly spews out lip service on how genuine and committed they are to getting a JCBA, they have not made any real moves at the negotiating table since June of 2020. Their go-to response to our constant efforts to move things along has been, ‘Current Book’ or as of recently ‘No Provision’. On the other hand, the union has constantly made substantive changes during that same period of time to get movement at the negotiating table always with the company responding as above. Therefore, it is now obvious that the company decided to stop negotiating and wait for the arbitration that they have coveted for over 4 years. An anti-employee goal for which they have, by our estimation, wasted over $1 billion dollars to get to this point. It is clear that Atlas values their pilots at a level below what Kalitta values his pilots. Standby for more lip service from them.

On the union side, leading up to negotiations, the Atlas and Southern negotiating committees have operated separately with approximately weekly coordinating meetings to compare notes. As we approached the deadline yesterday to submit the final arbitration proposal, the two negotiating committees had discussions to put the different proposals together into one. As it turns out, both proposals were pretty close in most of the major areas that are still open. In the end, with the assistance of the IBT, the final union proposal was arrived at. I applaud the Southern negotiating committee’s hard work and diligence in their efforts to get the best result .

This arbitration process is one that was never intended to be used the way Atlas has used it over the years. It is a process that we have resisted and one that the company has used in every contract negotiation at Atlas since 2002. Their objective has been not only to keep us at wages and work rules below what we should have in this industry, but also to deny a fair and equitable process to all of us. A process that every airline big and small enjoys and has enjoyed for 2 decades while we have not. It is a process that unjustly denies every crew member at Atlas, Polar and Southern the equitable and just right to ratify the CBA which we will live under. By the way, in the company’s final proposal, they have proposed the same Article 1 we currently have, so they can keep perpetrating the same unjust process over and over again.

Over the next month, the negotiating committee and the union in general will mobilize all of its resources to create the best case going forward in arbitration. We will keep you posted.

Fraternally,

Bob Kirchner

Trustee
IBT Local 2750

Negotiating Committee Update 02/12/2021

Negotiating Committee Update

February 12, 2021

As you have sadly grown accustomed to reading, management made little movement in this final week of negotiations. Further, we regret to inform you that, after spending the last five years attempting to engage in constructive dialogue with management to reach the industry standard contract you deserve, we are left with a significant portion of the contract remaining unresolved. Throughout the years, we made countless attempts at problem solving with new and creative ways of improving the working conditions and pay for our pilot group. Unfortunately, management never approached this process in a similar fashion, but instead chose a path of resistance, delay and obstruction.

From the onset of negotiations, we have always approached issues from an analytical standpoint where we benchmarked our proposals to the industry. The goal we set out to achieve was simply to gain the pay and benefits currently enjoyed by other pilot groups — never anything more, never anything less. Despite our reasonable objective, we find ourselves today in the position where management has chosen a path of hiding behind the arbitrator rather than leading the ship by taking the actions needed to recognize the daily sacrifices this pilot group makes in building and helping this airline operate efficiently.

Town Hall and Instructor Meetings, Employee Exchanges, and Ground School sessions have often been filled with statements made by management about ‘wanting to give you the contract you deserve’ along with claims like ‘we need to pay you more’ or ‘we plan to give you an industry competitive contract.’ The reality is that they apparently never meant any of it as their actions have spoken much louder than their words. We will never forget such behavior.

Moving forward, final arbitration proposals will be submitted on Monday, February 15^th. Preparations are already underway for arbitration, in which we will be supporting our excellent attorneys and subject matter experts. Dana Eischen has been selected as the arbitrator to handle our dispute and he will meet with both parties to hear and determine all outstanding unresolved issues from March 17^th through March 31^st (excluding weekends). We will report back to you as arbitration transpires.

It has been our greatest honor to serve this pilot group throughout these challenging times. We will forever be grateful for your unwavering support.

Sincerely,

Your Negotiating Committee

Chris Knox, Doug Malcolm, Heath Martin, Keith Carbine, Lionel Largmann, and Yngve Paulsen

Protocol Agreement Signed

Today, the IBT signed the interest arbitration protocol agreement with the company. The protocol agreement is a simple document that addresses structural issues relating to the conduct for the upcoming arbitration.

Let me address the process and pertinent facts we have been through to get to this point and what needs to happen going forward:

We need an arbitrator to comply with the CBA’s timeline, something that was dictated by Judge Cooper from the US District Court Washington, DC, last year.
With the timeline below in mind, I approached the company negotiators in early October to select an arbitrator. They delayed this selection for over a month and then punted it over to their anti-labor Los Angeles law firm.
This law firm demanded a ‘Protocol Agreement’ for arbitration, despite the fact that it is not required by the CBA ‘process’ or the court order.
To this day, the company’s lawyers have refused to select an arbitrator until we have a signed protocol agreement.
After months of delay, the protocol agreement has been finally signed by the IBT and the company (see below).
The protocol agreement has nothing that is airline or local union specific. What is in the document affects the Atlas and Southern pilots in completely the same manner. In fact, there is nothing that is controversial in the document.
Today, we have engaged the company on the selection and scheduling of an arbitrator. I will let you know how they respond because, as you can see, they have been in no hurry to say the least to select an arbitrator.
All the while, time grows short to select an experienced arbitrator, as their schedules fill up quickly.

Negotiating Committee Update 13Nov2020

Negotiating Committee Update

November 13, 2020

Due to the increasing concerns regarding COVID-19, once again our committees met remotely during this week’s negotiation session. Overall, this week resulted in no direct negotiations with management.

During this session we have spent a tremendous amount of time refining our costing models, which show that not only is their supposal a step backwards, but also that their $1.4 billion-dollar price tag that they placed on our supposal is nothing more than a made-up number, intended to make us lower our offer and negotiate against ourselves.

The cliche ‘garbage in, garbage out’ comes to mind as we are finding a lot of garbage thrown into the company model for the purpose of inflating the purported cost. So far, numerous errors and erroneous assumptions have been found in the model. When these errors are added together, the aggregate compounding of them is how the company is able to achieve a cost number that is higher than what any other airline spends per pilot on a contract.

In a recent employee town hall meeting, our CEO stated that it is critical that we agree on their costing model. We feel that it is not important that we agree on their costing model, but it is important that we agree on a correct costing model. Our costing experts have been working non-stop over the past few weeks gathering information in what has amounted to over 1.7 million lines of data in order to build an accurate model. The process of running the data for each metric that is changed and tested through our internally developed tools and sophisticated models takes a significant amount of time.

We therefore spent this week both waiting on the company to come back to us with a real, and meaningful offer, while we narrowed our focus on meaningful costing. Our next negotiation session is scheduled for December 14 – 18.

Your Atlas Air Negotiating Committee

LOADSTAR article

‘Dogfight’ between Atlas Air and its pilots ‘won’t end for decades’

Negotiations Update 30102020

The Negotiating Committee just finished another week of negotiations. We met at our union office in Cincinnati while the Southern Negotiating Committee and management met with us remotely.

Since we made our comprehensive economic supposal on August 18^th, 2020, negotiations have taken a really bad turn. This session continued down the same path with management only meeting with us for one hour this week as they presented only one supposal. Their offer consisted of a bullet point summary of the remaining open items to be negotiated.Â

The supposal made by management is an attempt to close-out the contract by offering the current contract terms we have today. Some items offered are even concessionary to the contract you suffer under right now.
Â
The only major changes offered by management are:

Pay Rates so low that an Atlas Air 747 Captain at top pay would make $80.16 an hour less than a UPS top Captain at date of signing. These pay rates get more disproportionate as the UPS pilot group enjoys larger raises over the next two years than what management proposed to us.Â
Removal of all CRT pay while you are in your base. Pilots on an R-2 bidline would not receive CRT unless activated to fly. For example, a Miami pilot whose bidline consists of MIA-BOG-MIA would not receive CRT during his MIA layover.Â
Removal of extra pay for open time flying. No more 2/4/6/6 etc., when flying open time.
They offered a per diem rate of $2.50 an hour for the life of a five-year contract.

It is ironic that management did not use their financial modeling tools to prepare their own supposal given how important they say the financial modeling process is. Our modeling, however, shows that this entire offer is a concessionary supposal where our pilot group ends up with much less than they have today.

Our pilot group has built this company and continues to make it the financial powerhouse it is today. We question whether management is actually capable of negotiating a contract that recognizes our contribution to this company.

Separately, our attorneys continue to engage with the companyâs legal team as we are simply trying to schedule the arbitrator needed to conclude this contract. So far, our attempts at selecting an arbitrator and scheduling arbitration have been met with resistance.

We will continue to push in the fastest direction possible to close out this contract. Our next negotiation session is scheduled November 9^th through November 13^th.
Â
Your Atlas Air Negotiating Committee

NEGOTIATING COMMITTEE UPDATE: 20201002

Today, we concluded another week of negotiations. We regret to inform you that in the history of bargaining with management on your next contract, this week was the least productive session we have had to date. The only progress made this week was related to Article 25 â Scheduling, where an exchange of supposals by both sides resulted in a little movement on only a few items.
Â
As you are all aware, we have already presented our full economic supposal in previous negotiation sessions. In doing so, we had fulfilled every request management stated they needed in order close out the new contract you deserve. After management requested extra time to review our full economic supposal, we had hoped they would show up prepared with their own comprehensive economic supposal. Unfortunately, rather than making their own economic offer, management now wants us to engage with them in refining their flawed costing model, an approach we believe they plan to use against us in arbitration.
Â
The Company has rejected our supposals in their entirety on Article 4 â Profit Sharing, Article 5 â Travel Expenses, Article 6 â Gateway Travel, Article 27 â Insurance Benefits, Article 28 â Retirement, and Article 32 â New Equipment. In managementâs supposals on all of these Articles they went back to the current contract language we are suffering under today. We are highly disappointed to report that their actions speak loud and clear that they have zero interest in compromise.
Â
Management continues to promote the idea that an industry standard contract is not something they can afford. Do not be fooled by this propaganda. They will continue to push this narrative until the day our new contract is signed.
Â
For those who had missed the last update, we have once again included a LINK to a comprehensive summary highlighting the items we have successfully closed out in past sessions.
Â
Your Atlas Negotiating Committee