Frontier Bargaining Report #36

9/4/2022

Sisters and Brothers,

Your committee once again met with the company over this holiday weekend. As you may be aware, or not, as it was sent out at 5:30 PM on Friday, the evp chief people officer, Alan Gardner, sent you all an email describing his perception of the Texas negotiations. I would be remissed if I did not point out the inaccuracies of his email and clarify what has actually transpired. Your committee also would like to cordially invite Alan to attend bargaining sessions so he will have a better understanding of what is happening there. He states that we began negotiations in July and that is a fact. We have extended the contract twice. Also, a fact and the second extension will expire on September 23, 2022. The company still had outstanding information requests as he states in his email. Our initial Information Request was submitted on JUNE 24, 2022 and was not fully fulfilled until August 30, 2022. So another extension was appropriate from the Union's position. When a follow-up for the Anthem representative was asked for by the Union, it took approximately 2 weeks to get her back on zoom to ask questions. Alan talks about the company considering recent Union proposals. This is misleading, as we have had well over 20 proposals reflective of your surveys on what you told us would make a fair and just agreement to you. The bulk of the Union proposals was passed to the company on 7/22 and approximately 10 more on 7/27 with about half not being monetary. To date, the Union has not passed any Union proposals since 8/6. The Union has had several counters back and forth, as well as has the company,  but so far the Union has no recent new proposals presented, although we reserve the right to amend, modify, delete and introduce any proposals we see fit to get a fair and just agreement for you. The company has passed a limited number of proposals with several compartments to them, none of which are enhancements to the membership. In fact, they are either retrogressive in nature or increasing costs to the benefits you have. We will continue to ask any questions we feel are relevant to negotiations.

Alan begins his second paragraph with another mistake. He says we asked the company to bargain that morning. The truth is that the company was asked on Thursday if they could meet over the weekend. The company did confer and state they were not available on Friday but could meet on Saturday and Sunday. The Union informed the company that we are not available on Monday. During our weekend meetings, the company had nothing to present to us on Saturday and one item today with a couple of answers to some questions we had asked yesterday. Alan says they are committed to reaching an agreement that's fair to their team and meets our business objectives. The Union will be asking this week for a thorough overview of the company's business objectives and how it relates to their proposals and how that affects our contract. Hopefully, Alan will be able to provide that overview for us since he is the one that said it.

What we do know is that the evp chief people officer at Frontier has a base salary of over $400,000 which is close to six times our CZT1 pay. Almost our highest paying title in the contract. Seems like he would be a little more accurate in his reporting making that kind of salary. Do not forget he also gets incentives and bonuses in addition to his base. 

While the company is trying to rebrand itself with a new logo, new uniform colors, new wraps on the vans, and most recently, the NEW HARDHAT, and hedge funds owning a huge share of the stock, this may work for some of the customers, but the employees know the real FRONTIER as they have lived it since 2016 in Texas and it hasn't been pretty. Why doesn't the company try to rebrand itself with its employees? Give you affordable benefits and meaningful wage increases? Would giving employees working a split tour two days off in a row really hurt the bottom line? THINK ABOUT IT...

Use Yammer to sound off that you deserve to have consecutive days off. Tell them to utilize the 4x10 schedule already in the contract.

We hope you all have a safe and fun Labor Day!

The Bargaining Committee

TS/cmt
opeiu#13