Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Almost had another Recordable Incident today...
After the letter I received from Mr. Turner this past weekend, stating...We are pleased to announce that, while the Profit Sharing Plan for represented employees did not trigger, the Company worked with our Board of Directors, who approved applying a similar method of the calculation described above to grant a discretionary earned time off award to all represented employees.
...I expected a flight of chimpanzees to buzz Sid Stahl's head this morning but that didn't happen, so I can only assume that the determination of this "discretionary" award to represented employees occurred far after our Execs assured a bonus bigger than they'd earned for themselves... which would explain why we knew they got their bonus two weeks ago while ours suddenly appeared before us yesterday.
My boss has his weekly crew meeting tomorrow afternoon and I'll be asking him what he knows about when the Company approached the Board to grant us the ETO bonus and just what "similar method" was used, but I suspect that HR has kept him in the dark about this as much as they've kept me and he'll be unable to answer any of my questions, so please expect an "Open Letter to My Corporate Masters" posting later in the week.
-- Bill, who suspects my angry, represented coworkers far more responsible for my bonus than were our Execs...
Thursday, February 19, 2009
A time comes when silence is betrayal...
Dear Boss,
Rumor has it that you'll be getting your Performance Bonus on Friday. I just wanted you to know that I don't begrudge you the award because I know that you didn't have much to do with the Execs doctoring the performance numbers to get a larger bonus than our Company's real performance should have afforded.
I understand that you really do appreciate the sacrifice your workers gave in going to three-day workweeks and we, in turn, appreciate the hard work and effort you put in to try to convince your boss that your people deserved a performance bonus as well.
Perhaps we can have a discussion during our next crew meeting about your attempts to get our Execs to do the right thing and what we might do, together, the next time this happens, because we both know it will.
-- Bill, who understands the difference between true "leadership" and mere "command"...
Monday, February 16, 2009
Parsing PR's BS...
Last fall, in the midst of the Spirit reduced workweeks, a rumor ripped through the grapevine that an SEC filing indicated that, while we were on 60% wages, Spirit Execs had granted themselves another big stock bonus. The local media investigated the story and reported that the SEC filing was only an adjustment to previous stock grants, allowing the Execs to sell some of the stock they were required to hold long-term, in order to meet IRS tax obligations on their stock grants.
I'm fascinated, however, by the part of the news story that states...
Spirit spokeswoman Debbie Gann says ... it's unconscionable for employees to infer executives are getting additional compensation when employees are being asked to cut back. She says the claims are absolutely false.
...and I wonder if she'll make an equally outraged "absolutely false" response to the current bonus complaint, should some employee infer executives are getting additional compensation after employees were asked to cut back.
-- Bill, who's implying something's unconscionable...
Parsing PR's BS, Part 2...
The Eagle finally published the "Spirit Execs Doctoring Performance Numbers For A Bigger Bonus" story last Thursday. What I found fascinating in this report is the statement that...
Other groups of workers, who are part of other bargaining groups, have a profit-sharing plan that pays according to an earnings calculation before earnings and taxes. It's not yet known whether the payout will be triggered, [Spirit spokesman Ken] Evans said. That will be determined sometime in the first quarter, but he did not know when.
While Ken may not yet be able to figure out whether or not the unions' "EBIT greater than 12%" payout trigger occurred, it sure seems to me like the bottom of Table 4 on Page 8 of the Company's "Fourth Quarter and Full-Year 2008 Financial Results" report indicates company-wide Operating Earnings of only 10.8% for the year, well below the 12% trigger the Execs require from us for a payout.
-- Bill, who wonders if they change PR folks as often as they change their bonus targets...
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Okay,... I'll... type... slower... this... time...
In the Comments section of the "I couldn't make this $#!% up if I tried..." essay, below, some anonymous stalker** declares...
Actually, you are making it up by ignoring the elephant in the room in your rant. I suppose the fact that you could have had this bonus and keep turning it down isn't important right?...thereby missing the entire point of my
The issue I was whining about wasn't the bonus, itself, it's the fact that our Executives change their bonus target metrics with the frequency of an AM radio station, while they keep ours etched in stainless steel and planted in industrial concrete.
I specifically recall when the "EIP" bonus came up in our initial negotiations with Onex, because it fell upon me to explain the history, and our problem with it, to Nigel Wright. Which I was more than happy to do, as this anti-union tool has been a continued annoyance ever since Boeing first implemented it in 2000 as an incentive to vote against the WTPU certification.
Mr Wright seemed to completely understand our objections and was quite clear in his position that the non-rep EIP bonus would continue to pay out more than the represented EIP... but stated that his plan going forward would be that the payouts would be "closer" than they'd been with Boeing: the maximums would still differ -- non-reps getting up to 40 days pay while union employees were limited to only 15, max -- but the metrics for payout would be identical: proportionate share over 12% EBIT. Which would mean that any year there was a performance bonus, all employees would receive a part, albeit ours a little more than a third of the non-reps.
And we could live with that; after all, we've got guaranteed raise pools in our contracts and the non-reps had already lost a raise earlier in 2005, which meant that they'd need at least a 3.5% bonus every year of their career to just stay even (and even greater bonuses should they miss out on a raise pool again). It seemed like a decent trade-off and we bought into it.
It's too bad we could only guarantee our own metrics in negotiations, however, because shortly after our contract was ratified, the non-rep (Execs, Mgmt, and non-rep Salaried) bonus metrics were changed to a combination of EBIT, cash flow, and 787 performance. The odd thing is, while our EBIT is similar, cash flow and 787 performance has absolutely sucked over the past few years and, yet, Execs and non-rep M&S have been granted bonuses in each of the years while the rest of the workforce has earned nothing.
How could that be? We have the same EBIT, their other metrics are in the dumper and they still get a bonus while the rest of the workforce doesn't? What's up wit' dat chit?
Well, for the second time in three years, Spirit Execs have gone to the Board and convinced them that due to exogenous events allegedly beyond their control -- acquiring the European facilities in 2006 and the Boeing strike last year -- they deserved to have their performance metrics modified to allow them to collect a bonus significantly larger than our Company performance would allow under their identified requirements.
As to reports of our so-called leaders trying to convince the Board to modify our performance metrics as they have done for their own, all I've heard thus far is the sound of crickets, holding their sides and laughing.
-- Bill, who doesn't think "closer" means what Mr. Wright thinks it means...
** - regarding my accusation of "stalker," I've not posted anything to this 'blog since last October and didn't let the grapevine know about these essays until late this afternoon, so apparently the poor dweeb who posted the comment this morning needs to get out more often and not spend time each and every day checking and obsessing over what I may or may not write here.
Monday, February 09, 2009
I couldn't make this $#!% up if I tried...
Interesting little story circulating the Spirit grapevine today. It seems that there was a short blurb buried way down at the bottom of a business column in Sunday's Seattle Times, discussing Spirit Executives' upcoming "EIP" performance bonus.
Spirit disclosed this week that its board adjusted the annual incentive awards for management and some other employees "to mitigate the impact" [of the Boeing strike]. Each got 62 percent more than the company's short-term incentive plan dictated based on Spirit's actual results. President and CEO Jeffrey Turner, for instance, reaped a $853,416 bonus instead of $526,800.... 10,000-plus union workers are under contracts with a separate profit-sharing formula "that did not trigger a payout for 2008," says a Spirit spokesman.
Now, I may be the only person who wasn't surprised that Spirit Execs would give themselves somekinda bonus after, literally, stealing Christmas from many Spirit employee families. (Those young, new-hire families, who haven't been around as long as I have, couldn't possibly have the vacation balance nor savings account balance to weather three to four months of 60% paychecks we had, without serious impact to their budgets, and those months of short workweeks at the end of the year had to take just about everything they had.)
But even cynical ol' me was absolutely shocked into dumbfounded, mouth-dropping silence that the wages we gave up weren't enough for our Execs and they had to doctor the books to take even more of what little profit our company made last year, while denying the vast majority of the workforce, who made the significant sacrifice to keep us afloat, any share whatsoever.
Of course, I may be mistaken and it could be that, while they were increasing their share, our Execs argued to the Board of Directors in our defense to adjust our incentive award formula as well and got them to approve a share for us. And tomorrow morning at about 9:30, in the middle of Steve Turkle's weekly Lead Team meeting, monkeys will fly out of my butt.
-- Bill, who'd point out that we were on target for a payout in the middle of 2008 as well...
Helping others less fortunate...
-- Bill, who'd hope the Execs just sign their checks over to the Good Neighbor Fund, out of shame...
And if that wasn't enough...
You'd think that this bonus notification story would be the biggest "WTF?!" moment of the day, but you'd be wrong. That was reserved for one of the WTPU decertification supporters who, in response to hearing about this, suggested that we just need to get rid of the union so we can participate in these bonuses. Which sounded to me alot like telling some single mom that if she'd just drop the restraining order, the ex would stop harassing her.
-- Bill, who'd like someone to tell him, just one more time, about how we can trust management to do the right thing on their own...
