D-Day July 1st??

[Guest Worried]

Perhaps someone can clarify this, but I work at an International station and our Union shop steward has just returned from a crucial meeting in YUL. The news is extremely grim with some of the main Union Leaders apparently walking out of the meeting. We have been advised that the next 2 months are critical and unless we all do something, AC is going under come July 1st, following on in the disastrous footsteps of Swissair, Ansett, Sabena and many more.

I simply do not understand why we are being taken to the brink like this and call me naive, and perhaps not fully understanding of the workings of labour laws and Unions in Canada, but it looks like they may just succeed in taking us all down unless we act now. They are playing with many thousands of livelihoods and people seem to forget that the Union Leaders will still have a job at the end of this...whatever the outcome...we most likely will not. I fully believe that employees must cast the Unions aside and all rally together and take matters into our own hands, with a representative from each working group/department liaising/bargaining closely with Management to try to obtain a satisfactory outcome to everyone. Yes, there may be some pain along the way but you know how that saying goes.

We've got to take immediate action.....it may only start off with small groups of employees rallying together, but maybe if the media were to get involved, word would soon spread right across the country to other employees.

Airmail is right, we need to use public vehicles in an attempt to sort this out.

The bottom line as I see it is this...we either allow this debacle to carry on as it is, getting nowhere fast, or we try to do something now and stand up and be counted and save this airline. So what if we have to make concessions, we either retain the pretty nice jobs we have now, or the company goes into liquidation and we all lose our jobs and maybe, just maybe if some of us are lucky, may get re-hired by whatever new airline starts up but with rotten new contracts paying a lot less in both salary and benefits.

Just in case you're wondering, I can tell you that as an International station we have voted to freeze wage increase increments which apparently has almost met the cost savings required from us.

As a final thought, I just heard the other day that Swiss, which re-emerged from Swissair, is virtually bankrupt again.