Source: ourcontract.org

The JNC completed our first mediation session with United management on Thursday. We met for three days in Virginia, not far from Dulles International Airport, and Senior Mediator Patricia Sims and Mediator Catherine McCann oversaw the sessions. 

Being that this was the first session since talks ended in July, both sides needed to reset ourselves from the facilitated problem solving process we had been in to the markedly different process that is mediation. Our first day was spent being briefed on how mediation was going to work, and then the JNC and Company each spent time separately with the mediators to review what we viewed as open sections and remaining subjects that need to be resolved.

As we told you in recent updates, since talks ended in July, the JNC has spent a lot of time together developing proposals in preparation for mediation.  On Wednesday morning we presented the Company with a full text proposal on Scheduling, Minimum Pay & Credit, Hours of Service, Contractual Legalities and Reserve.  Later in the day Management presented us with a proposal on Training & General Meetings. 

The proposal we gave to the Company was quite large, and rightfully so as Scheduling, and all the provisions that go with it, is core of our Contracts today and will continue to be when we have a joint Contract.  We presented the Company with an important, complicated and large proposal, and we believe it addresses interests and concerns that Flight Attendants have identified and we have advocated for. Our proposal has also been crafted to address the interests and concerns the Company has identified over the last 2 ½ years of bargaining.  We spent a good deal of time Wednesday and Thursday afternoons answering questions the Company had about our proposal so they can be clear about what we’re putting forward and how to respond. 

We know that many of you were hoping that Oscar Munoz’s appointment as the new CEO was going to signal a different tone and tenor at the bargaining table, and to be honest the JNC was hopeful as well.  However, being realistic, no one should have expected earthshaking changes in the first 3 days of mediation, and there weren’t any.  That said, three days is also not enough time to fully assess where this latest phase of bargaining is going to take us.

We are working on a response to the Company’s proposal on Training & General Meetings, and we will do that by building off the work that was completed on the subject in the facilitated problem solving sessions.  We look forward to a thoughtful response from the Company that also builds off our efforts of the last year and demonstrates a desire and willingness to find a resolution to these negotiations.

Two weeks after Oscar Munoz took over as CEO he said the employees of this airline had made a few things “obvious and actionable.”  He went on to say, “we need to unite the company from the inside out, and look forward, rather than backward. The merger was five years ago, and it's time to move beyond subsidiary-level thinking.”  All of us on the JNC agree with Oscar and the mediation sessions that lie before us are where we expect to see that forward looking action.

Mediation will resume in Chicago on November 3, 2015.