Yesterday United Senior Vice President of Inflight John Slater took the unusual step of putting out the company’s perspective on the pending termination case of two Flight Attendants with decades of service at United Airlines. While Mr. Slater claims he is revealing the facts, it turns out he is giving an incomplete and company-oriented perspective on the matter.
Flight Attendants face difficult times over the last several years which at times creates differences within the work group. AFA deals with issues among Flight Attendants through our Professional Standards program which encourages the parties to resolve problems.
United management, on the other hand, chooses to deal with disputes among employees with their typical approach--by mass firings and intimidation. Indeed, that is what happened here where management has terminated almost a dozen Flight Attendants. That is the underlying problem here and why defending our right to representation and due process is so important.
While United management claims to be against intimidation, they have no problem publicly going after long time Flight Attendants who received a sham investigation from the company before pushing forward with termination proceedings. In their rush to judgment, United management has ignored the fact that our contract contains the right to a fair hearing and there is a process which includes binding arbitration.
We do not publicly go into details on cases which may be pending before arbitration, so we will not comment on the underlying cases other than to say we vehemently disagree with the company’s presentation of the “facts.” We can and will talk about the underlying issues here which are United’s punitive approach to problems and complete lack of respect for union rights.
Our position with United Airlines management has been crystal clear. We have never argued that AFA representatives are above the law, but rather they must be able to investigate the facts of the case and represent our members without intimidation by management. If management is allowed to interrogate Union representatives on questions within the scope of representation, it will destroy the grievance procedure and our ability to represent our members. We will not let that happen.
Those are the fundamental issues at stake in our litigation against the company in Federal Court. The Court did not determine the merits of our arguments that management violated the Railway Labor Act but rather ruled that the dispute must be settled by an arbitrator through our Contractual procedure. We look forward to having a chance to present these cases without delay. We believe these should be scheduled as soon as possible.