Thursday, June 18, 2015

Vacation and Meldowns






 We went to the Lawn Club on our cruise and we (my dad and I) got to cook with the chef's!  It was great fun!

So the intention today was to catch up with a post about our awesome vacation, which has been overshadowed by the need to touch on the giant meltdown at dh's airline.  So it seems dh's airlines crappy management has caught up with itself ie: chronic under staffing of everyone, FA's, dispatch, schedulers pilots (to some extent) and of course outsourcing the gate agents.  Turns out you can only beat people so much before they rebel or in this case quit (dispatch).

Their convoluted hiring of FA's has screwed them as well (also the fact that the FA's have gone 8 years without a contract).  Take for instance my good friend named "Pam."  Pam went to an open house to be a FA, she would have been great; she's a great person, who is upbeat and nurse!  So she sent her resume in and got a call!  She was planning on going to the job fair in Dallas (which they were hiring for that base) so imagine her surprise and displeasure when the email said that she needed to go to LAS job fair and interview!  This was approx a week before the LAS job fair and she couldn't get the time off, much less pay for a last minute r/t ticket there, not as if they would get her out there for the interview.  So they lost an excellent potential FA because of stupid paperwork snaffu's like this, take this an multiple it, now you have a problem.

The airline is trying to grow, I understand that, but you have to have support staff to do that, you can't grow pinching pennies it's not as if the airline couldn't afford it.  So now in the heart of the meltdown, our esteemed (sarcasm) MEC has told the company that in order to "get the airline back on track"  the pilots will happily ignore the contract, fly more that it allows, and for no extra pay.  You can imagine that hasn't gone over well, especially in this house!  I am completely astounded the MEC would decide this, management needs to be held accountable for their penny pinching, short sightedness.  Telling them we will happily break the contract for them is only enabling them.  The MEC also used the veiled threat of "if we don't help the airline it  will be in real trouble"  ie: you might need a new job.  Fine so be it, let the airline fold (I doubt it will) when issues like this happen and the MEC folds it just lowers the bar across the board for all airlines.