BACK TO THE FUTURE…

...OR IS IT; ‘FORWARD TO THE PAST’?
JOHN SELVAGGIO RETURNS FROM THE DEAD

Recently Delta Air Lines announced the return of John Selvaggio to head up Comair. You might remember John from his previous stint at Delta. Mr. Selvaggio served as Senior Vice President-ACS and also headed up Song Airlines.

You would think that seeing the 'slime green' paint scheme would be enough to keep anyone involved in that nightmare-of-an-enterprise to ever see the light of day in an executive board room again but you would be wrong. Airline executives have nine lives. They have a habit of re-emerging from time to time. This move is hard to figure. I still shudder with embarrassment at the memory of watching the boarding process of a Song flight. The attempt to create a comedic atmosphere while announcing the rows to be boarded resembled a dingy off-strip Vegas lounge act, shaming those employees who were forced to perform as well as the confused passengers.

Perhaps the rumors I have been hearing about budget short-falls are actually true. Word has it that ACS is 60 million dollars in the red for this fiscal budget year and no more money will be spent on us. Mr. Selvaggio could actually be an executive willing to work for less.

Could it be that we are running in the red because of the mistakes made during the “Year of the Bag” campaign? Since the inception of the campaign earlier this year, misconnections have sky-rocketed. The costs of delivering misconnected baggage as well as related expenditures in meals and hotels must be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. This is money that will be coming out of our pockets when the profit sharing checks are delivered early next year.

Had Joe Kolshak, Executive Vice President-Operations, listened to the experts who pleaded with him to not go forward with the changes he made, we would not be in this mess. He is responsible for the disarray we are in concerning baggage numbers and budget short-falls. Mr. Kolshak, pony up and shoulder the responsibility.

The millions of dollars wasted on the Velvet Rope Tour could also help account for the budget crunch. We have no money for industry standard wages but plenty of money available to brainwash employees. How sad and pathetic.

What does all of this have to do with our union campaign? Good question. The answer is simple. Quality workers who could have made a difference in a successful operation have been side-lined or worse, dismissed. In our managers’ short-sited attempts to save money by contracting out dozens of cities, competent and talented individuals in ACS were let go and forced out. Many were pushed into retirement or ignored.

There was an attempt to deliver the positive numbers of our past using temporary contract workers and Delta connection carriers. This has proven to be a catastrophic failure. Those of us who were fortunate enough to keep our jobs were made to do more work for less money; all the while our executives were making plans to profit off our sweat in the form of executive perks, stock options, bonuses, KPI money, incentive pay, etc.

Had Delta been willing to focus their efforts through us instead of around us, our numbers would be the envy of the industry, now they are left to scramble and explain away our failures by blaming others. (FAA, antiquated equipment, etc.)

When Delta starts to listen to its front line employees and pay us the industry standard money we have been promised, we will get the results required to run an airline in the black. In the mean time we will not let up in our quest to organize through IAM and garner what we need and deserve through our own efforts, all the while continuing to provide our customers the quality experience they deserve.