Thursday, July 21, 2011
"But we're giving you just what you asked for…"
On Wednesday the Spirit Management negotiation team -- who, in the interest of full disclosure, I must admit many I've worked for and whom I like and respect, personally -- sent out their opinion of their contract offer, much as we did on Tuesday. Little that was stated in the Company's message differed much from our critique, in content, at least, if not in form. But I was struck by one statement -- The Company approached these negotiations with four goals – all were directly related to the need to keep the Company healthy and our team for the future intact… We shared these goals with the Union team, and in all of our efforts kept coming back to them as we worked through various proposals -- and the implication that the SPEEA Team was, somehow, unreceptive to those goals. That was hardly the case, so, to clarify…
Goal 1 : Ensure stability for our customers and competitiveness of the unit, through an enhanced partnership with a long-term agreement
We surveyed our members prior to negotiations and found that, almost unanimously, they would not accept the ten-year contract duration given to the IAM, IBEW, and UAW. Digging a little deeper, however, we realized that what our coworkers were saying was that they wouldn't accept the ten-year contract to which the other units agreed. So it wasn't the duration, itself, that was the problem, it was the wage, benefit, and job security structures within those agreements that were the issues; given sufficient protections, my coworkers could live with the long-term agreement that Spirit said they desired. So when the Company countered our initial offer of a 3-year agreement with a 10-year agreement, our negotiations team was more than willing to discuss and agree to a mutual goal of a long-term contract, provided the protections were in place that would assure our members wouldn't suffer unreasonable impacts.
Goal 2 : Maintain the flexibility required to uphold a healthy business that aligns with the production cycles and productivity challenges
The SPEEA WTPU Negotiation Team isn't as clueless or as blind as some might lead you to believe. Among the five of us, we have well over a century of experience in this industry and have lived through more "business cycles" and "productivity challenges" than half the population on the face of the Earth would ever experience. We understand that customers can be fickle and cancel contracts for which we've already started work. We are quite aware that "exogenous" events, like 9/11 or an avian flu, can disrupt and cancel delivery of our contracted products. So we had not much problem in granting the Company additional flexibility to ride out these unplanned events: we were willing to accept changes to our current contract language that would allow the Company additional leeway in exercising the temporary layoffs and short workweeks that would get us through those unforeseen disruptive times and allow Spirit to meet their stated intent of keeping "our team for the future intact."
Unfortunately, that significant concession wasn't quite enough for Company negotiators: they also demanded the right to keep outside contractors -- hardly what we would believe to be "our team" -- fully employed, denying that work to our members, suggesting that we be those who take the economic "hit" during the bad times, instead of the contractors who were allegedly hired to fill in the gaps. Our negotiations team was unwilling to put those outsiders ahead of "our team," so the temporary layoff and short workweek provisions remain as limited as they were in our last contract. But let's be clear that it was the Company's decision, not ours.
Goal 3 : Align compensation with market and business performance, while providing baseline protection
Here's where the biggest conflict arises, so I'll leave discussion of this until after I explain why the negotiations team also had little problem with…
Goal 4 : Provide Health Care options that align with the needs of the membership as well as supporting the realities of the economic conditions through the life of the contract
The Negotiation Team understands Spirit's need to maintain standard medical coverage for its workforce and we had no problem accepting the few changes to coverage that the company requested to bring us in line with the rest of Spirit's employees.
We did push back on the company's initial proposal to immediately increase our portion of the medical insurance premiums from 10% of cost to 20%. Not that we had a significant problem with the 20%; we do our own research and understand what the healthcare market is today and a 20% premium during the next decade is quite reasonable. We objected to only the immediate implementation of the increase and we proposed a gradual implementation of a 20% premium with a 2% increase per year until 2016, which the company accepted and placed in their final offer.
We also proposed caps on those premiums that equaled to a growth of 7% per year. We believed that to be quite reasonable, considering that the growth Spirit's seen over the past 6 years was right around 3%. The company, however, was not interested in caps.
At least not any caps that would benefit us…
(to be continued)
-- Bill, who apologizes in advance for his "unprofessional" sense of humor…
Comments:
Post a Comment
