We All Deserve a Real Seat at the Table to Decide Our Future

June 13, 2014

A report from Velvet Hawthorne, US Airways, CWA Staff Representative

It was great to have Tammy from the AAB at our quarterly meeting, and I look forward to American agents and reps having a real seat at the table after our election.

The CWA-IBT co-chair, Kimberly Barboro and I always coordinate the issues we will raise that we feel are most urgent and need immediate attention by management at the new American Airlines.

It was great to see the support Tammy gave us in the meeting when we spoke about the vendor issues we are having in many of our airports.

The issues we raised rang a similar note to the non-union workers regarding the vendors that were hired to replace many of Tammy’s coworkers at the airport and now work side by side with the seasoned agents.

The customer service issues were varied, but the same message was expressed from across the country, the contractors are just not trained or engaged enough to give the type of service the customer is used to in the airport.
These meetings have been instrumental to making meaningful changes. Hearing from front-line employees gives Mr. Parker and his team the chance to directly address any problems they didn’t realize were happening.

With the CWA-IBT Association, we still have local committees in each location who work with management on things like schedules, health and safety and charitable groups, we just also have a national voice.

I’ve worked with management on behalf of CWA for a number of years now, and we’ve by and large had a good working relationship. But when it comes down to it, they’re there to grow the company’s bottom line.

If we want to guarantee a secure future for agents and reps at the new American Airlines we need to do more than just hope management decides to be nice, we need to win our election for CWA-IBT Association representation