National Association of Air Traffic Specialists

Aviation Safety is Our Business

Bulletin #12

From

Don McLennan

These notes are based on a review of the previous 11 Compensation Bulletins that were released last year and earlier this year. I have tried to capture the highlights of those Bulletins.

In Bulletin #1 I discussed the need to develop a final product to be delivered to the full negotiating team for their consideration and it had to be value driven. It went on to say "To ensure our success we must have been thoughtful, open-minded, and yet, far-sighted in our development of a new compensation system. Remember we have already developed a new classification standard that is now ready for implementation. NAATS will have completed our goals for compensation if we implement a system, compatible with what we created during Reclassification. It must move our bargaining unit forward, maintain parity with other bargaining units within the Agency, and reward those employees who are most productive."

Based on our meeting last week with the new management negotiating team their common theme and, apparently, sole focus seems to be there is no money in the FAA budget to even have a meaningful conversation about what we have been working on for the past several years. They indicated they would like to implement those aspects of our pay proposal they feel they can. However, at this time they have not been able to share with us what those would be. They only received our proposal on November 6, and as such, probably need time to engage in conversations amongst themselves and the Administrator to determine where they want to go.

At this point it would be misleading to tell you we are anywhere near agreement. If we were dealing with the Air Traffic Division I do believe we would at least be somewhat close. But we are not. We are dealing with the Administrator’s team of mostly Human Resource people and her attorney. It is unfortunately, all too typical of the Agency to urge their employees on to new heights, to encourage them to "think outside the box", to wish them success in moving forward to meet the challenges of the future, or simply to change because that is currently in vogue. It is with a certain degree of sadness I share with you my personal belief that they, unfortunately, never fail to let us down at the finish line. I am not saying their intentions are less than genuine, it is really their inability to control their own fate that constantly leaves them coming up short. Thus, three years ago it was fashionable to be discussing exciting and novel compensation systems. Today, though, we are told we must be "realistic". I think this is a euphemism for, "Sorry we already gave all the money away!" There are roughly 45,000+ employees in the FAA and the Administrator blew the budget on the first 15,000 up to the trough. Are we disappointed? You can’t even imagine the depth of frustration, sadness and maybe now even some cynicism on behalf of the several people who have been working this issue with the FAA for YEARS. It was a lifestyle for some of us. Can you imagine how "You need to be realistic" sets with us? Enough said.

In Bulletin #2 I explained there was a great deal of work to be done in the area of agreeing on how to proceed in developing a system and what that system would cost. The Agency (at least at that time) shared their need to stay within normal budget parameters. They were willing to discuss, in fact pressing the issue, the need to develop a new and improved compensation system that was particularly necessary (their characterization) to the FSS option. In fact I said, " NAATS is clearly making a commitment to evaluate a new compensation system based on the costs of a per person basis as opposed to organizational costs. The organizational costs may be more in the "architecture" area than in the compensation area." This point seems to have escaped the new management negotiating team. If we are to continue to discuss the FAA’s desire to change the FSS option, (i.e., Consolidation, part-timing, Transfer of Functions, etc.) we must agree this is where we will find cost savings, greater efficiencies, improved customer products and the entire litany of the FAA’s "business plan".

Bulletin #3 was the "costing" bulletin. It went to explaining how the Agency needed to try and determine the cost of the FSS option’s personnel to enable meaningful discussions about potential costs increases (e.g., CIC and OJTI differential) as opposed to simply discussing them conceptually and having no idea of what the bill would eventually be. This has still not been done. The management team seemed very concerned that we might not be able to conduct good faith negotiations if we didn’t know the dollar value of our discussion. Of course, that takes money and the Administrator must award a contractor some significant $ to tell her what the FSS option costs the Agency. I know, pretty weird. It gets stranger still.

Bulletin #4 was written it captured our efforts in exploring the values inherent in the FSS option. I said, "They ranged from "people want more pay" to "status quo" to "recognizing differences in workload" to "getting paid more with fewer people" to "expectations that nobody loses money during transition" and so and on. I would dare say there was little, or nothing that was missed. This first session was exploratory in nature on behalf of all workgroup members but provided a great deal of information about what NAATS expected from new pay. It also highlighted the fact that our bargaining unit is split right down the middle and that just about as many people want to change as there are those who want to remain the same." I added, "This was all captured way back in our first Reclassification meetings."

The significance of the meetings was to try and get in touch with what was really important within the FSS world’s expectations. To be successful here we wanted to avoid those banal clich�s we realized would not fit within the FSS world. We felt no need to design a system based on the expectations of the contemporary "reform experts" of the day, but which could not possibly be effective or productive within the culture and operational environment of the FSS option. As you know we received information covering just about a little of everything. It created a broad spectrum on which to try and build a singular compensation system. At the same time management had some needs that did not necessarily fit within any one new system. This created a tremendously difficult task that was sure to satisfy less than everyone but which none-the-less had to be undertaken. To simply walk through pay negotiations three years later and say, "We are actually pretty happy with what we’ve got and would just like to be exempted from changing" would be to let management determine our fate and disregard are responsibilities under the law to represent our bargaining unit members. Therefore, we continued to move forward.

By this time the "Architecture" concept, once again, reared its massive head. We articulated our position that we were not opposed to discussing these concepts but wanted to make clear that we were not capitulating our rights to determine which ones were worth jointly pursuing. Bulletin #5 shared the thoughts; "it was rewarding to discover the management members of our group felt as strongly about this as we do. It is also their understanding that we do not have a preconceived system in mind and we are developing it jointly to fit what we know to be, not what some would like to see in the future. We will discuss ways to build subsystems into our new plan to allow for change, but it would not be under the banner of trying to implement any specific program through a new pay system. I imagine architecture will be very important in being considered within the development process of a new compensation system, but in the context of allowing for change in the future and being sure that the system can be managed effectively." What does all that mean?

It was suppose to mean that management and the Union, participating on the workgroup, were in agreement we had no hidden agendas and no "required" outcomes. There had been other workgroups with different charters that reached, to our way of thinking, really obtuse and far fetched conclusions on where, what and how the FSS should approach the millennium. We wanted to insure we were not opposed to discussing any thoughtful or productive solutions to change to fit the next century but that we possessed, on the work group, the subject matter experts and the knowledge to perform this task carefully, thoughtfully with candor and honesty. Again, there were neither hidden agendas nor any preconceived outcomes to meet. What was paramount here was the need to reach a conclusion that what this workgroup designed, developed and presented to the full negotiation team was the complete package, incorporating both management and union needs and desires. To that end, before being unilaterally dismissed, I believe we were succeeding beyond even our own expectations.

Since by now we were on a roll, in Bulletin #6 I asked the question, "Why pay people more?" I added, this was a question in desperate need of an answer. My conclusion, based on the work of the group was "Productivity is probably the cornerstone of most people’s response to that question. Our time on position is phenomenal compared with other bargaining units. Look to the operations per specialist factor, it is growing in all of our facilities. This is probably due to a slight growth in the GA activity as well as an ever-decreasing workforce. Also, we can now demonstrate differences where we couldn’t before. Our new traffic count more clearly reflects those aspects of our work that previously have gone unrecognized and had not warranted recording. This is a very important aspect in successfully implementing a new pay plan based on productivity. You should not be performing work that is integral to the system but is simply not captured because nobody thought it was important. Finally, we acknowledge that workload, volume and the complexity of the operation, taken all together, make it clear that there are different levels of work when reviewing all 61 AFSS operations nation-wide."

I will always receive a tremendous amount of push back on this bulletin from facilities that perceive themselves as "smaller, level one type" facilities. This is unfortunate because that is not how I would characterize them. They are, realistically, afraid of being ripe for consolidation if they end up in a new system displaying a traffic count lower than other facilities. However, that is already available under current information without any new system designs. Their concern is they might not enjoy the same compensation increases as a facility that is recognized with a higher traffic count.

They quickly point out they are as busy, if not busier than larger staffed facilities, and contend that certain aspects of any traffic count cannot be quantified accurately and are, therefore, misleading. I can only say that this was not persuasive to the workgroup when laying out all 61 AFSS traffic counts and considering dual volume levels, workload, and staffing. The case can certainly be made that traffic alone is not the overriding, all inclusive, far reaching determinate of who is more productive than who. But what falls out when you look at everyone across the nation is the immutable fact there are some facilities that are busier because of weather, demographics, geography and staffing. In the world of the "Why pay people more?" question, and to change to fit the next ten years, it was not reasonable to dodge the tough questions and say everybody is doing the same thing and everybody deserves to be compensated in exactly the same way. However, let me be the first to say, if the FAA is not going to live up to those aspects of necessary change agreed to in the workgroup it is very likely NAATS will adopt the posture of not changing anything. This will not happen through a sheer surrender of current benefits. Instead, the Agency will encounter NAATS’ alternate position of what we need to remain status quo. All members are to be treated identically since we are all performing the same functions in the same manner and to the same degree. The Agency needs to recognize they are not going to get it both ways. No productivity recognition (i.e., no Reclassification recognition, no differentiation among our bargaining unit members) will lead to negotiations with a Union where everyone is performing the same, producing the same and meeting the identical demands made of them. The Agency will have accomplished the task of wasting thousands of personnel hours and hundreds of thousands of tax payer dollars in recanting, their apparently insincere, desire to develop a new compensation system to meet the needs of the future. Their plan is clearly to fleece their employees in the name of becoming "performance" based, even though they have no performance system in place to accomplish this. If I sound disappointed, you have no idea. Remember though, I warned you it would get stranger still?

Before I move on I want to reassert a point I made in my last NAATS NEWS article. The Union has been treated fairly and respectably by our management counterparts in the AT Division. You will have to draw your own conclusions as to who are the people my disappointment is directed at.

On to Bulletin #7, then. Here, we discovered a number of people in places and occupations, which were not effectively covered under the compensation system developed to that point. We identified FSDPS personnel, ATCSCC personnel, AAL Region FSS Personnel and their Specific Issues, New Hires/New Entrants and Developmentals. Before we finished we nailed down the New Hires/New Entrants and Develpmentals but the persons and their issues have still not been addressed.

We hit a higher plane with Bulletin #8. This was the first Bulletin where I began to receive lots of mail. Oddly, none of it was directed at what was in the Bulletin but, instead, with what was on those people’s minds that shared their fear NAATS was derailed and heading down the wrong road. I always believed these were letters written earnestly, and honestly, sharing the author’s frustrations with changes that had not been adequately or acceptably explained. The failure to adequately explain is mine alone and I get to take another shot at it here. I wrote, "but the question is do we want to have more than a singular, FPL status? We could decide, for example, that we want someone to serve at the lower end of a pay band for the first three years they are a journeyperson, then progress to higher levels of status. Probably the negative response to this would be that once a person is facility rated they should receive "full" controller pay and we should not create some sort of "B scale" pay system. Also, would this be creating two levels of experienced controllers that could possibly put the Agency at risk if there were to be a post accident question of competency (that is, a legal issue)? Is this newcomer really as competent as a more experienced controller is? A major issue is, what do you use as reasonable criteria (to be determined) to decide when and how to increase someone’s pay to the level of the more experienced controller? What kind of developmental opportunities are there for our people to become better controllers instead of only developing themselves to move into management positions?"

The Core Compensation Plan is that under which you forfeit any and all future WIGs. Even the contractor the Administrator hired to "assist" us in our deliberations thought it was a little harsh to drop someone in a pay band and never, ever experience the possibility of a pay increase on anything other than performance for the rest of their lives. Therefore, NAATS, in conjunction with management and our contract expert on the workgroup, developed the concept of three levels of journeyperson experience at any singular facility level. Once you became facility rated you would spend three years developing seasoning through experience and then move to a higher paying plateau. After attaining the intermediate level you move to the expert level through advanced qualifications and training. At each of these passages you receive an increase in pay. While I am not the expert, I would expect most of you would feel this accommodation is better than simply surrendering your future WIG increases and confronting a world with no possible increases other than "performance" awards. Don’t think I don’t realize there are those who are going to say’ "I simply don’t want to go to that system, I just want to keep what I have." I know change is more difficult for some than for others. However, when that is the only game in town you had better own up to being as good as you can be at it or accept your fate will be determined by others. NAATS accepted the challenge and worked with all our might to represent and protect you.

Moving full steam ahead we jumped through Bulletin #9 and into annual increases. There are those that would accuse me of not even understanding what I wrote and they may have some validity. When reviewing what was said I must confess I was pleased I had grasped as much as I had to that point but maybe could have done a little better with the explanation. What I wrote on OSI/SCI was, "NAATS’ presented their desire to establish a policy on annual increases. We have had extensive briefings on both the ARA and NATCA methods of doing this. It is imperative that even though we are attempting to develop a specialized pay system for Controllers we must still, in some way, connect to the FAA Core Compensation System. This is the FAA wide pay system that will replace the General Schedule. Primarily, we are interested in connecting within the Core system components of the Organizational Success Indicator (OSI) and the Superior Contribution Increase (SCI).

"There is a "Payroll Rise" of 1.6% caused by your annual WIG increase. Over the eighteen years of getting from a step 1 to 10 that is the average annual increase. In the core system WIG increases are abolished and, instead, a pool of money is created using the WIG money to fund the OSI and SCI components. The OSI is paid annually to everyone and the SCI is paid annually only to the organizations’ top 15% best performers. NAATS agreed to adopt a formula for the OSI/SCI 1.6% total payout whereby the bargaining unit members would realize the following: the bargaining unit will receive the national GI equivalent plus 1.2%. If in a specific year the annual OSI from the FAA is greater than the GI equivalent plus 1.2%. NAATS will split the money beyond that amount equally between the remaining .4% of the SCI pool and the OSI pool plus 1.2% by a 50/50 split between the SCI pool and the OSI pool."

I have doctored that statement today to accurately reflect what I believe to be compatible with NAATS’ current proposal. Try and understand what that would mean to you in the way of an annual increase beyond that which you already receive.

We went back discussing how we envisioned potential pay increases under the developing compensation system in Bulletin #10. This was mostly dependent on how we designed pay bands and how many levels of bands would there be in the system. This was to cover both facility levels and journeyperson levels within a specific facility level. There were many questions in this bulletin that have remained unanswered today. Some of the more important ones that we did work on were, "Pay bumps would begin to differ at the completion of the first level of developmental training. This is an important topic to discuss later -- how often do you want to reward developmental employees? Should we establish incremental increases at the developmental levels, or pay the entire difference between Academy graduation and FPL certification all at once? Once you reach the FPL level there may be several bands to move through to become a senior level specialist." And later in the bulletin, "We also discussed a five level (three now and two for the future development of the option) facility structure. Once you become a facility rated FPL you will finally enter the FPL ranks, at one of three distinct facility levels of pay. What is the relationship between a level one facility to a level two facility to a level three facility? It will depend on how much money for implementation is available, and agreed to, at the contract negotiations level."

Concerning the first topic of multiple journeyperson levels in a facility we addressed this earlier when we talked about trying to implement a system with other than a singular, one time, bump in pay upon attaining the FPL level of proficiency. As for the later, NAATS has designed a system that allows for at least three levels of facilities based on the new traffic count’s "index" that covers volume, workload, and staffing. It allows for movement between facilities for those wanting the opportunity to earn more, as well as diversity for those interested more in locating to certain regions of the country. It allows that you no longer need to be promoted but recognizes that you are already an FPL simple moving between facilities with differing levels of activity and staffing.

Finally, in Bulletin #11 we discussed the need to research pay system "conversion" factors to insure we didn’t sacrifice anything more than that we have already identified. I shared with you that, "Pay system "conversion" is that process of how to move from one pay system to another pay system. Our view is that we would like to "buy out" our pending WIG increases. This means that you would have added to your initial "new", base pay, in the new system that percentage of a WIG you had already earned within the old system." Also, " We need to agree with management on a break-even amount to make an ATRA roll-in acceptable to both management and the Union. That is, how much money would go to an employee and how much money reserved to the government so they do not incur any additional expenses as result of taxes, retirement, etc.? The Agency agreed with NATCA and PASS to an amount of 4.1%."

These were two of the more tangible areas we had agreed to in the workgroup before being told to cease further development. I do not know if, as a result of negotiations, they will remain as presently agreed to by the parties. It would be a shame if the good work done in consensus between the union and management had to be redone because the players changed. I think that is the ultimate rub in dealing with management. If we negotiate something that higher management doesn’t like will we find ourselves back here again with a new group of people? I do not think it gets any weirder than that.

Since terminating the Compensation Bulletins I had not heard from anyone except those who shared with me they found the bulletins confusing and they didn’t say much. While that is not what an author wants to hear I am pretty sympathetic. The subject matter is not something which most of us have any great depth of knowledge about and the workgroup was researching and developing as we went so most of the information was pretty "soft". I was therefore surprised when at the convention there seemed to be a significant number of members who asked that, the above notwithstanding, would I continue to try and publish something to keep you informed? The answer is, of course. I simply thought no one cared and it has been an awful lot of work. This is why I have thought to go back and recount where we were in such a way that we can view yesterday’s news in today’s environment. I hope you find this helpful. Keep an eye out for future volumes and I will do my best to make them as clear and precise as I can.

Back to Bulletin List.

Walter W. Pike, President

This page was last updated on 26 June, 2000