11.21.15 – PHL PBS Bid Award for December

Saturday, November 21, 2015

PHL PBS Bid Award for December

Dear Philadelphia Flight Attendants:

When PBS opened and we saw the line averages and Reserve numbers, the LUS leadership requested a conference call with the Crew Planners, Crew Scheduling, Laurie Lofgren – Managing Director of Inflight, Cindi Simone – Managing Director of Labor Relations, every Inflight Base Director and Base Manager to discuss the high line averages and Reserve headcount. They provided us with charts of Reserve usage historical data that would have been fine under a hardline bidding process, but not under PBS. We have no historical data for PBS bidding.   

We argued, pleaded, and begged the Company to lower the line average, which would have created more bidders and prevented a lot of the forced coverage into Flight Attendants lines. They did finally agree to take a look at the numbers at the time of the run to see if they could make an adjustment. We were extremely disappointed when the final numbers were released. The PHL line average was reduced by 20 minutes and the reserve number actually increased by 2. PHL will also see 50 new hires within the next 3 weeks which will further increase our Reserve numbers.

In spite of our best efforts, the Company did not take the recommendations of the leadership and now we are left to deal with the fall out. The primary focus and concern for your leadership is to make sure our Flight Attendants are not further harmed during this very important holiday month. 

Shortly after the PBS bid awards were posted, the membership brought to the Union’s attention several inconsistencies with the bid award and we immediately addressed your concerns with the Company. The Company contacted the PBS vendor, AOS, and it was determined that the December PBS run had exposed an error in the AOS PBS application. This error resulted from having multiple holidays in a single month and resulted in a mis-award for 219 Flight Attendants systemwide. AOS was able to identify the affected Flight Attendants and the Company will be contacting those Flight Attendants  to offer a remedy. Philadelphia had 27 Flight Attendants that were mis-awarded due to this error.

Obviously when the LUS Base Presidents were made aware of this issue, we demanded a rerun; however that wasn’t possible because AOS could not guarantee that the second run would be error-free either.

We recognized that there was a bigger issue than just the error with the 219 mis-awards, including the forced coverage that was applied to Flight Attendants lines due to “coverage needed”, and ultimately the Reserve lines.  

Your base leadership has worked tirelessly over the last 48 hours with numerous conference calls and discussions with the Company, the APFA National Officers, the JIRC Committee, the other LUS Base Presidents, and the APFA Scheduling Chair to provide solutions for the way the PBS run was conducted. The result of those efforts has been posted on Wings by the Company. Also, you were also sent an APFA LUS Hotline that explains how the Company is trying to respond to the problem, even if you were not technically mis-awarded. 

Please be sure to review that information. If you believe you were mis-awarded, please contact the Flight Attendant Resource Center (FARC) at 480-693-8232 to have your bid reviewed.

In Unity and Solidarity,

Kim Kaswinkel
APFA PHL Base President
[email protected]