General Items
This report will be very short as I was away much of last week.
Negotiations were held in San Francisco last week and will continue in Denver this week. The official update can be found here. The parties have been discussing one of the Unions main concerns and that is the grievance procedure. While progress may appear slow it is important that we get this right.
The Cabin Crew Subcommittee met in San Francisco last week and we are continuing our work on the alternate scheduling of this group.
The Pension Subcommittee will meet this week and when I have more information I will pass it on. This link was posted a while back on the blog and it is an estimator for an annuity that is similar to a defined pension benefit. The Fidelity link will be added to the useful links section since I received several questions on this. It is amazing how expensive these plans are.
As far as United's health is concerned a mechanic from San Francisco passed on this article from Bloomberg. It talks about the difficult circumstances we are in but notably the S&P analyst, Jim Corridore, rated the stock a hold even after the S&P initiated a credit watch on UAL. Another article that talks about United can be found here. This article talks about United's current management style and its effect on morale. In doing some research on employee dependability, I have found that researchers claim an almost two percentage point absence rate difference in companies with poor to fair employee morale as opposed to companies with good to very good morale. That small difference on a unit our size could contribute a couple million dollars to the bottom line. Anyone interested in these researchers' reports let me know and I will email them to you.
On a side note one of the negotiators is trying a new breakfast regimen in order to maintain stamina. This new diet is called "Chocolate milk and toast". Watch out South Beach I think there is some real competition here.
There are no department reports for this week. I did receive some second step grievance answers from MM that will be elevated to the third step. In addition I was able to talk to the PV Manager and resolve a couple of small items.
That's all for this week,
Bob
