Wow, how a week can change things for us. We know we told you last week that we intended to publish pay period thirteen with the same dynamic scheduling as we had been, but due to multiple reasons, traffic increases being the biggest, we have found ourselves needing to change during pay period twelve. We had promised a special update on any necessary schedule changes, but due to circumstances leading to us not having all the intricacies ironed out until late this afternoon, we held out on the update to ensure that we were able to provide all of the accurate details.
Schedule Changes
We will be transitioning to a two crew, five days on, five days off schedule starting May 28th. This is in response to increased scheduled activity with the airlines, flight schools, military and general uptick in flights with the states starting to open up again. It is important for us to be proactive versus reactive and balance the safety of the NAS with social distancing. As stated in the last update, this is a move that must be made facility wide to keep cross contamination to a minimum. While we don’t have enough people spread across three crews to support the heavier traffic, moving to two crews will likely put more people than needed on each shift. To address this, we have negotiated with management to put some people “on call.” In essence, this will be EA in addition to your five days, but you are subject to recall during this time. It is extremely important that we do not mess around with this. If people do not answer their phones, we are certain they will stop it all together and you will be required to show up for your entire five days.
Here are the key points:
On days that you are “on call,” management has up to four hours before the start of the shift to recall you.
There is a distinct difference between your “on-call” EA and the five days of EA you have after your five days of work.
Recall of employees during their “on-call” EA is determined at the local level. This means it can/will probably be done the day of your shift. We do not want anyone to find themselves in a bad situation because there is a need to recall them and they do not answer or are out of commuting distance. As stated above, please take this very seriously because we don’t want to lose the ground that we’ve gained with management on our bare-bones staffing and additional opportunities to social distance.
Recall of employees that are on their five full days of EA will still come from the district level. This will likely only happen in the case of a positive COVID-19 case and will have a couple of days notice.
Taking a sick hit will not always necessitate a recall. This will be determined by management on a case-by-case basis and will consider many factors including projected traffic, weather, military operations and any other factors that may impact our workload and our ability to handle it with the staffing we have.
Your area reps and area schedulers are working out the “on call” rotation but in general, this will happen in order of seniority
The current start and stop times of the shifts will not change.
Every area will be slightly different but all will get no more than ten consecutive days of EA. This was determined nationally and not negotiated at the local level.
These schedules will be challenging for your rep and scheduler to build so please have patience and know they are working very hard to ensure the “on call” time is distributed evenly.
Charity
As of this update, we have raised $2813! Amy dropped off checks for $500 each to the Bonney Lake and Sumner Food banks and made electronic payments of $500 each to Auburn and Kent food banks. We plan on dropping the check for Puyallup off on Monday. We have had suggestions for the Mission Women’s Shelter in Tacoma, Auburn Humane Society, Muckleshoot Resource Center and Maple Valley food bank, hopefully we can get to them all. Keep up the awesome work ZSE!
As of right now, we still have not heard even a whisper about staff specialists/non-essential employees returning or training resuming anytime soon but we’ll let you know as soon as we do. It is safe to assume it will happen fairly quickly when they do decide that though.
As always, we hope you are all staying safe and healthy. We are here if you need anything, even if it’s just to talk to someone besides your family (seriously, call us, we’re losing it here). Thanks for your understanding as we make this transition sooner than we had hoped. As with everything up to this point we have no timelines and we don’t know exactly what to expect in the coming weeks and months, but your Eboard will continue to work on your behalf to make this all as painless as possible.
In Solidarity,
Derek Adams and Amy Sizemore