Episode 52 - Executive Board Update

In the latest MEC Podcast, MEC Chair Jacob Astin, MEC Vice Chair Barret Armann, and MEC Secretary Treasurer Vignesh Sridhar give a update from Executive Board Meetings at ALPA HQ in Valo. During this update, the MEC officers talk about the following topics:
• Spirit Airlines Closure
• Negotiating Committee Update
• MEC Resolutions & Feedback
• Occupational Health & Safety Committee
• Communications and Email Updates
• What is DART
• ALPA Building Tour with Barret Armann

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Transcript

0:06

Welcome everybody to another edition of WestJet's Pilot Podcast. I'm Jacob Aston, the MEC Chair, with Barrett Armann Vice Chair. Vignesh, the Secretary Treasurer. Quick shout-out to Taylor behind the camera, our new communications, member at ALPA hi, Taylor. Hello. We are filming this, May 7th in Washington, DC, at the ALPA headquarters, first off, I just wanted to acknowledge that, over 2,000 ALPA pilots at Spirit have lost their jobs, last week. the ALPA pilots, feel deeply it's a really hard time for a lot of pilots. they projected at the start of the year that they would be hiring about 8,000 pilots in the United States, and hopefully all those Spirit pilots land on their feet with an ALPA carrier as soon as possible. further to that, just wanted to shout out to, Sean Creed for all of his work. That's a true unionist at heart and, he's given a lot to ALPA and the people that he represents, so it will be a loss, but hopefully we see him back soon. quick shout-out, to the crew in YVR that dealt with the blown tire incident about a week ago. Very professional. respect to you. Thank you for doing that. deserves a shout-out. Thanks, Barrett. Another shout-out to, Captain Sean Creed. I've worked closely with, Sean, in his time as the VP of, administration and, secretary at ALPA National. there's no one I've ever come across who knows the constitution and bylaws as well as the admin manual, like the back of their palm, and Sean's, responses have been, extremely quick, faster than anyone I have, ever known. Thank you, Sean, and I'm sure union business will not stay away from you for too long. At the 20th regular, meeting that, the MEC had last week, the West- YR status representatives have elected, Captain Kevin Collins as, the chair of the negotiating committee. This now completes, and we have a full complement of five members on the negotiating committee. Captain Collins, Captain Klassen, and, First Officer JD Sutherland are the main negotiating committee members. We have, First Officer Sohail and, First Officer Kakpora as the alternating negotiating committee members. excited, we are all to, work with this new team towards, The collective agreement number three. We had five days of meetings, last week. we came straight from there right to Washington. it was five days of meetings, and we worked through the initial negotiation survey data, the second survey coming in June. there was some issues with the survey that we pushed out, some people not getting links, so we're working to try and resolve that. but the meeting that we had, we increased legal resources, , from ALPA, so we got to meet the new candidates that are coming in to assist us. Alicia, she's gonna be the legal counsel that we have. Christina will also be used. she comes from ACPA, now ALPA. Tyler Burke, joins us, from QP, and he's got experience in labor relations also. over the five days, we reviewed the collective bargaining process, refined the initial mandates, worked on strategic planning so we can prepare for bargaining 2026. Yeah, further to that, Barrett, we have heard some comments about, the first negotiation survey, so we're looking to shorten that a little bit, making sure that the survey is easy to run through for everyone. CA3, mandate was started to be worked on at our last, meeting last week. At a high level with the reps, we're on the road to our collective agreement negotiations, working on surveys, which we have the next survey coming out for negotiations next month in June. We're working on a flight deck feedback survey for this month, so you guys can all give us, your thoughts on what's going line. And initial language, sections are being crafted currently. thanks, Jacob. In line with, what was discussed at the MEC meeting last week, about 15 resolutions have come up from your LEC status representatives to be considered at, the MEC meeting. the resolutions range from scheduling items, hotels, deadheads, all the way through policy changes on how the MEC governs itself, overall. the one interesting thing that stood out to us was, along with, the mandate that, Jacob had spoken about, some of these resolutions have had the MEC ask us to consider a few items. you pilots have socialized this amongst your peers and have taken the effort to bring it up to an LEC meeting. We're gonna collect all these resolutions, put it into one big pot once it's past the MEC meeting, and when we build the final mandate, we're gonna see how many of them align with the final mandate, and at that point, go through each and every one of them to see where they fit in lines with the overall mandate, which may include your surveys, feedback from your status representatives, as well as other forms that we use to build a collective mandate. Thank you for taking the time, the effort, and the energy to direct your LEC status reps to direct your union the way you want it to function. Thank you, Vignesh. as an LEC rep myself in the past, I would encourage all the pilots to come to the LEC meetings and bring resolutions. What do you guys want? How are you directing your LEC reps? talking to Delta reps this week, and they said they have what's called a Green Book. So all these resolutions for things in collective agreement negotiations goes into the Green Book. then the Negotiates Committee at Delta looks through all these resolutions as they're applicable to the mandate and into their own negotiations. So we're looking to do a similar type of thing at the WestJet property. Perfect. hey, something exceptional happened last week at our MEC meeting. one of the committees came down to present, Denton Miller for Occupational Health and Safety his committee that he's reinvigorated. previous to him there were, just three members of the committee. They were fairly new, and it seemed like there was a lot of rubber stamping going on, and that needed to get fixed. So Denton came down, presented to the reps, and eight of eight reps voted his proposal right through. So Denton now is gonna have a committee of 12 across the country, and he is busy at work finding all of the issues that we deal with day-to-day, whether that's the dirty flight decks or an inappropriate hotel or even heat in the cabin. there's a lot of hot cabins there, pilots are sweating, passengers are sweating, no reason for it. I'm super excited about that, working with Denton, expanding his team across the country. Thanks, Barrett. one thing that's changing on the emails is for those that are on, reserve, there's usually a reserve, graphic at the bottom of the emails. That will be part of an attachment, so for all those that are on reserve that are looking for that data, that will be an attachment on our emails. And replaced by that will be a list of all the events coming up for all the bases across the country, at the bottom of all the emails. So you should be able to see at the bottom of the emails a list of LEC meetings, family awareness events, pub events. So all of these can be seen right on the emails, so everybody can know what's going on. many of those will be live links, so you could register and sign up for those events keep an eye out for that. quick thing about, DARTs. dart.alpa.org or your phone has the DART, portal through the ALPA app. There is an attachment to this email that shows an expanded, explanation of what DART is and the questions that you have on the line going right to the subject matter experts to answer directly to you. So please do check out that attachment in this email for further information about DART. Thank you. I think it's important to say the reason why we file DARTs is because, Vignesh will get a text in the night or you will or I will from different individuals asking questions, which is fine. But there's no way to track them, and if we don't have the answer, we have to go to the person that does have the answer, but then we have to circle back with the person that had the question. this DART system streamlines it, keeps it recorded. You can track it. a better solution. last week, we were at the regular meeting and, I saw something pretty exceptional. All of us coming together rowing in the same direction. It's a rarity sometimes, I've seen it before, but last week was something really special. You could tell everybody's on the same page so I think we've got the right team here going forward, into bargaining 2026. Thanks, Barret. what we're trying to do with these emails and our communications is not inundating your email box with communication after communication, but trying to make sure that the information we pass along to you is valid and timely, so we're gonna try to put out communications as timely as possible for the whole group. as we look ahead to the next, 30 days, we have the negotiations committee now fully set up starting to work on various projects We have legal resources coming online to our property as we integrate them into everything that's going on here. As I've already mentioned, we have a Negoте survey coming out next month, a flight deck feedback survey coming out this month. We use that data, especially the flight deck feedback survey, to craft what we're doing as an MEC, to get you the communications you guys need. at the bottom of the email will be a list of all the events going on, so please check out that list and sign up for all the things you can to get out and see what's going on the line. So thank you for tuning in to this very quick podcast, and we're gonna pass it over to Barret for a tour of the building. Thanks. Good afternoon, everybody. Barret Armann, your vice chair here. We're a 30-minute drive from Washington DC, but I thought it was important to show everybody ALPA. Most people don't know how many people work for ALPA and what they do, so today we have a quick break before we go back into sessions, start in approximately 20 minutes. Give you a tour of ALPA, show you what they do. Let's go. Okay, walk with me as we go through the building. We go to the fourth floor. There's your chair. He's grabbing a bag lunch. Okay, here we go, up to the fourth floor. And welcome back. We're gonna start on floor four. Give you a quick tour and then work our way down to floor one. Reception, Now, there's lots of people that work here, and I don't know everybody's names yet. Hi. But they're doing an exceptional job. Here are all the chief offices. This is the last bit, but it might be the hardest. We won't bother you. No. Oh, my God. The membership never knows what actually goes on at El Paso, how big it is. Okay. So I just called you the big chief. The big chief. That's right. As we go down the steps, you'll see pictures of all the EXL presidents, who they were, how long their terms were. Welcome to floor three. Each floor has symbols on the history walls And on each floor, there's approximately four different wings, all offices. Come and see. That's the length. Okay, new sound booth. Let me show it to you. It's right over here. There it is, soundproof podcast room. You wanna know who this guy is? True unionists know the reason why his picture is up on the wall. look up his name, Captain Nemo. Welcome to floor two. I gotta get back to work. I have approximately 12 minutes. We'll see,