Our Members
It's hardly an overstatement to say airline workers are the finest workers in the world.
We deliver on a daily commitment to safety and customer service. For many workers it's a simple reflection of who we are. For some it's a family tradition.
While service and safety may be close to our heart, we also control purse strings of something close to airline executives’ hearts (such as executive hearts may be). We routinely affect customer decisions to come back and spend money – with every bag we handle, and with every customer greeting & smile.
The effect can be decisively positive, as with the uniquely tailored “Buck-An-Upsell” experiment at United. Unfortunately for employees, customers and shareholders, the affect can also be negative. Corporations such as UAL and US Airways cling to amazingly inefficient misconceptions, one being that customer experience can be entirely “managed.” They actually believe it, and convince their managers to believe the same. That’s why we see executives coughing up one flavor-of-the-month following another, all with rotten or no operational affects. They believe in process. Our Members believe in people. We believe in each other first, and in our customers. Amazingly when employees come first and take care of customers, shareholders profit. There’s some brain science for everybody.
Safety, service, profitability
All of this – safety, service and profit – is delivered against a backdrop of industry chaos, executive blunders and greed, and declining public approval. Yes we are “committed” to our daily work, but that doesn’t mean we’re crazy.
Executive level abuse transcends roller coaster fuel costs and free-for-all market competition. For decades we have become accustomed to subsidizing executive extravagances and blunders. That's yester-Union. Not in the sense that airline executive are no longer pleading poverty. They are. We are more prepared, with better, smarter Union leaders, and airline executives don't like it.
everybody, Welcome to a new Union
Just because we are pro-Union doesn't mean we are anti-business. Here’s what we're anti: Subsidizing business mistakes and short-sighted business calculations. Our sisters and brothers at Southwest Airlines are not part of District 141, but Southwest is one of the most heavily Unionized – and most profitable – airlines on the planet. They face the same market conditions we do with one difference: Capable executive management.
The bottom line is the best workers in the world deserve the best executive management, and not porky pigs we have today at too many carriers. That doesn’t mean any one executive has to go, it just means executives have to work for employees, customers, and shareholders in that order.
keep going
Keep up your commitment: To safety, to the customers and to each other. Establish and keep up a commitment as well to subsidize no longer the management missteps we used to take for granted. That means a lot of things which we’ll talk about in the future on this web site.