New Round Of Explosions In War Of Words Between FAA, NATCA
(Editor's Note: The following is the
unedited text of a letter posted on a website associated with the
Professional Airways Systems Specialists (PASS-MIDO), from National
Air Traffic Controllers Organization president John Carr (file
photo, top right) to the COO of the FAA's Air Traffic
Organization, Russ Chew (file photo, bottom right).
(Although Chew was greeted warmly by
the controllers union when he came onboard the then-new ATO in
October 2003, now two years later Carr takes
issue with many of the promises and assertions he maintains Chew
has made since then, statements Carr maintains the ATO has failed
to live up to. As one example, Carr cites Chew's 2004 statement
that "our 2005 operating budget includes sufficient funds to
support our target level of 15,333 controllers." At this time, says
Carr, the FAA employs roughly 1,000 fewer air traffic controllers
than that figure -- and the federal agency is claiming
poverty.
(Aero-News has received confirmation from sources within the
FAA that this letter is authentic.)
***
Mr. Russ Chew
Chief Operating Officer
FAA Air Traffic Organization
November 30, 2005
Dear Mr. Chew:
On October 18, 2003 the National Air Traffic Controllers
Association welcomed the Air Traffic Organization with open arms,
calling the initiative "bold and smart." On a personal note we
invested in you a tremendous level of trust, calling you
"innovative and thoughtful." We loudly proclaimed that your
ascendence raised the curtain on a new dawn for the agency. We
embraced your blueprint and publicly proclaimed that you gave us
all a "once in a lifetime chance to make real and lasting change to
the organization." We invested a great deal of our organizations'
time, energy, effort and money in your embryonic little experiment.
We gave you instant credibility with the workforce when you had
none. We embraced your arrival as a shot in the arm, and we did
everything in our power to enable, engender and insure your
success.
The ATO promised to
correct an overly complicated management structure. You called for
union participation as a priority at every stage. You proposed a
bottom-up structure that flattened the organization and focused on
customer service. You proposed a leaner structure that empowered
managers. You promised to staff the system. On these, and on
virtually every other metric we can conceive of, the Air Traffic
Organization has failed the system. More pointedly, the Air Traffic
Organization is a complete, total and abject failure to the men and
women we represent.
A few examples will illustrate my point. In a speech you gave on
July 12, 2004, you said, "The key to our ability to operate and
maintain the high levels of safety and efficiency that air
travelers have come to expect is our highly skilled workforce. Our
2005 operating budget includes sufficient funds to support our
target level of 15,333 controllers. Overall, about 83 percent of
our operations budget directly supports the delivery of air traffic
services." And yet...you currently have almost 1,000 fewer
controllers on board than that number. The system is straining at
the seams, traffic is rapidly growing and operational errors are on
the rise.
This constitutes a failure to the men and women we
represent.
In a speech on February 24, 2004 you said, "We've flattened the
organization to bring decision makers closer to the points of
service delivery. The old organization included 19 high level
organizational entities. The new organization has 10." Then on June
23, 2004 you said, "The old organization had 11 layers of
management. The new one has 6." In reality, and as I've told you
previously, your "new" organization has taken us from 7 layers of
management to eight, 9 Regional Offices to 18 (nine terminal and
nine center,) and perhaps most egregiously in a new customer
focused, service delivery organization we have gone from a
best-practices 9:1 controller-to-supervisor ratio to a bloated,
bureaucratic, unwieldy 6:1 controller-to-supervisor ratio. Add this
wasteful reality to your organization's inability to staff even to
your own target levels and you have greater and greater numbers of
managers watching fewer and fewer air traffic controllers working
more and more aircraft. Hardly what we would characterize as "bold"
or "smart."
On the subject of labor relations you have always maintained a
hands-off managerial style. You may attribute that to heirarchy,
politics or policy, but the net effect to the people we represent
is harmful and deleterious in the extreme. On your watch the
FAA/ATO has imposed one set of pay and work rules on an unwilling
workforce, threatened another (NATCA,) stonewalled still a third
(PASS,) walked away from a fourth (AFSCME,) and come in dead last
in a non-partisan and rigorous survey of best places to work in the
federal government.
In fact, the FAA is exceedingly lucky that the authors of that
survey (The Partnership For Public Service and American University)
quit ranking federal organizations and just tied the worst of the
worst at 143rd. If they had continued to rank the lowest of the low
the FAA/ATO would have plummeted like a sack of hammers, coming in
163rd in Family Friendly Culture, 165th in Training and
Development, 182nd in Pay and Benefits, 197th in Effective
Leadership and a mind-numbingly poor 203rd in Strategic Management.
As you know, FAA Administrator Blakey wants us to be "data-driven,"
proclaiming loudly and often that "facts are stubborn things."
Well, there are the facts. There is the data. And yes, it does
indeed indicate some stubborness.
In air traffic control facilities across the nation the ATO's
failure to instill a fair labor relations culture has emboldened
zealot managers to higher and higher levels of audacity. Threats,
intimidation and fear have replaced a just culture in air traffic
management, and intimidation and reprisal are the order of the day.
On the ATO watch 12 families spent this Thanksgiving wondering
where their next meal was coming from because you stood idly by as
they were removed for an offense you personally know to be
commonplace (even in the pilot community from which you come.) And
what did the FAA/ATO do about it? They lied to Congress, briefing
both House and Senate staff that they weren't really going to
"fire" those controllers, the punishment was going to be mitigated
down. Well, Russ, they're sure as hell fired now. While Bruce and
Rick and the rest of "The Gang That Couldn't Fly Straight" might be
proud of themselves we are not. In fact, we're disgusted.
Air traffic controllers now face discipline for operational
errors, replacing a decades-old framework of accident prevention,
learning and safety with one of distress, misgiving and
uncertainty. If the horrors of September 11th were to happen today
we are not certain that the system would be able to react because
your management team has effectively chilled and terrorized the
workforce to the point where individuals are afraid to act
independently for fear of losing their jobs. At the risk of
sounding trite that's hardly what we'd call "innovative" or
thoughtful."
The FAA and the ATO have broken numerous signed agreements with
their employees, ranging from the liaison program to the payment of
over $20 million dollars in earned wages under an agreement struck
with Administrator Blakey. Your team of Vice Presidents cannot even
master the complicated art of first scheduling, and then actually
attending, meetings with the union representing well over half of
all of your employees. More complicated matters such as aviation
safety awareness, PCS allocations, facility consolodation plans,
nationwide bidding procedures or even your own projects, such as
the GSDFs, are hopeless dreams, stuck in your newly created stove
pipes. The ATO has managed a unique feat: It has replaced a
bloated, crusty, stove-piped military-style heirarchy of
bureaucracy with a shiny, brand-new bloated stove-piped
military-style heirachy of bureaucracy.
Your call for union
participation as a priority was a joke, a hollow shell, a charade,
a cruel hoax. I cannot think of one single, solitary thing that you
personally or your leadership team organizationally have done in
this regard. Not one single thing. Not a meeting, a letter, a
decision, an action, a memo, a call or a Post-It note's worth of
consideration has been given to the union's role in your
organization's affairs---a role, I might add, that is granted by
law and protected by statute. Our attempts to get a married air
traffic controller couple moved to one of the most critically
staffed facilities in the nation begat a blizzard of condescending
emails from one of your Vice Presidents, correspondence so
forgettable that his name escapes me. But I do recall that at the
end of the day, after having two entire leadership team's worth of
effort put to the grindstone on this one, your team was able to
wish us well and even hope that things worked out for the couple.
That's a pathetic joke.
Since we weren't able to put Tab A in Slot B it's no surprise
that issues of difficulty or complexity, like New York and Dallas,
weren't even officially broached between us. Your organization was
so committed to "union participation as a priority" that you did
not even involve us in the brainstorming, creation or strategic
planning around the ten year hiring plan. It was no surprise then,
to learn that the plan was predicated on faulty logic and
assumptions that did not take into account the fact that the three
years you used for retirement snapshot data were years when
employees were least likely to retire. Your personal attempt to
meet regularly with my union was undermined from within the ATO
organization, and to this day no tangible proof exists that we ever
met except for perhaps a couple dozen missing donuts from the
Krasner Building.
The ATO's maintenance philosophy is dangerous and extreme. NATCA
fears that replacing preventive maintenance with a "fix on fail"
mentality that you hope will ultimately save money will actually
erode an already thin margin of safety. The FAA/ATO's inability to
hire and train sufficient aviation safety inspectors, engineers and
certification specialists was the subject of a recent congressional
hearing, and promises to do better come too little and too late.
The results of these cost-cutting decisions won't be felt for
several years, but when they are indeed felt we can all point back
with regret at the decisions made to save money in the short term
against the cost to the system in the long.
In fact, many of the members NATCA represents in the
certification community have been around aircraft certification for
quite some time, almost 30 years in many cases. They tell us that
FAA oversight of type design safety has degraded at such an
accelerating rate that we are rapidly approaching the point of
complete abdication and hence effective deregulation. Since what we
do does not usually have an immediate direct effect on aviation
safety, as long as industry can truly be entrusted to "do the right
thing"; with our fundamentally governmental responsibilities and
authorities, all will be well. But without the long term forces of
independant regulatory accountability counteracting the short term
economic and other transcient forces facing business today, NATCA
fears all will not be well for long.
From NATCA's perspective the FAA's lack of response to the GAO
report on designees is telling. The FAA is continuing to implement
ODA when they are completely unable to oversee their current
designee systems. The FAA's lack of hiring of engineers in the
Aircraft Certification field offices is exacerbated by the movement
of managers to non-safety related positions, forcing employees to
act for them. During this time of unprecedented growth, when a new
airline can start up virtually overnight, the FAA's inability to
focus on getting more employees working on safety action programs,
Airworthiness Directives and new technology programs associated
with Type Certificates and Supplemental Type Certificates is deeply
troubling. The cumulative effect of these changes to the world's
gold standard in air traffic maintenance and aircraft certification
could be disasterous not only for the agency but the flying public
we jointly serve.
The FAA/ATO "Mediator"
press briefing on November 28th was noteworthy for several reasons.
First and foremost, until that briefing and one you personally gave
the AOPA leadership you had shied away from all things labor
relations, even proclaiming that the ATO has "zero to do"with LR.
To find you at the podium actively engaged in contract negotiation
and briefing with the press was surprising to say the least. You
had more to say about our contract than you have ever previously
disclosed, in two years of meetings with NATCA's leadership team.
Your briefing was also noteworthy from another perspective: It was
WRONG. Your numbers were wrong, your characterizations of our
positions were wrong, and your subsequent email message to ATO
Management and Colleagues was in all likelihood an Unfair Labor
Practice in and of itself.
For someone who proclaimed as recently as August that you had
nothing to do with labor relations, and who insisted that his hands
were tied, and who spoke of "shifting" authority and "evolving"
responsibility, you sure took a hard stand, attempting to publicly
damage our organization's ability to reach a voluntary collective
bargaining agreement. You advocated skipping the progress being
made at the bargaining table (where yesterday, within five minutes
of meeting the parties had reached agreement on National Pay
Procedures.)
You chose instead to shill for Blakey's request for mediation,
in spite of the fact that your own negotiators publicly posted just
one short week ago that, "We did manage to get quite a lot done
though... we TAU'ed another handful of articles and exchanged a
number of counter offers/proposals. This week is being spent away
from the table as both teams (or at least the Agency Team) will be
preparing for a two week session which runs from 11/28-12/09 back
in McLean Va. Our schedule is presently running through 02/03/06 as
we don't actually expect to be done by the ambitious date of
Christmas '05, but we did discuss the possibility of adding
negotiations dates through March 10, 2006." So...your contract team
says they managed to get "quite a lot done," and they know that
their schedule runs through the first two months of next year. And
Joe Miniace has explored dates in March 2006 for negotiations. And
yet the political appointees decided the time was neigh to call in
the mediators? Far from being the "shot in the arm" we thought the
ATO would be, this latest publicity stunt looked more like the
FAA/ATO had shot themselves in the ass.
I could continue to catalog these points for you but I see no
useful purpose in recapping the entire two dissapointing years.
Speaking of no useful purpose, the National Air Traffic Controllers
Association's National Executive Board sees no useful purpose in
continuing to support the deceptive pantomime that the Air Traffic
Organization has become.
Therefore, NATCA has decided to withdraw all organizational
NATCA support from the Air Traffic Organization effective
immediately. We no longer endorse, support, condone, or otherwise
encourage the organization you have created. In fact, at a time and
place of our choosing we will openly and publicly denounce it, and
the litany of our dissapointments will make this email look like
the Reader's Digest Condensed Version. Facts, like union presidents
and FAA Administrators, continue to be stubborn things. This
notification is quite pro-forma, since (window dressing
notwithstanding) you have not included us in your organization's
tactical or strategic discussions or decisionmaking since the day
you took office, but it is important for us to mark this date and
time for our union and our membership. History will record who has
chosen wisely here, and based on the ATO's performance over the
last two years we are very comfortable with that arrangement.
To be clear, our
members will continue to perform their duties and will follow
orders to perform other work as assigned. In spite of your
organization's jihad against them they have remained consummate
professionals and you can expect nothing less going forward.
Nothing contained herein should be misconstrued as to constitute
anything other than an organizational divorce. NATCA has
irreconcilable differences with the ATO you have created. From our
perspective the ATO had a once in a lifetime chance to make real
and lasting change, all right. And the ATO blew it. Our efforts to
date have done nothing more than disenfranchise our members and
strengthen heavy-handed managers. We fear your organizational
efforts will ultimately facilitate the degradation of an air
traffic control system that we will be operating long after the
current regime of political appointees and their sycophants have
retreated down K Street to their public relations firms and cushy
private sector deals. While others are picking up their pricey
consulting arrangements we will pick up the jagged pieces of the
air traffic control system, like we always do, and soldier on.
I wish you nothing but the best in your future endeavors. I am
sincerely striken that the ATO did not work out as promised. I
invested a great deal of personal and political capital in your
success, bringing to you a level of credibility with the workforce
that you did not have or earn. I stood beside you every step of the
way for the last two years, publicly and privately, in the Towers,
the TRACONs, the Centers, on Capitol Hill, and among countless
constitutency groups. My public and private statements, speeches,
interviews and conversations have been infused with my deep
conviction that you were a man of high principle, great integrity
and a personal friend of mine who would lend his genius to helping
to solve some of the institutional problems we all knew the agency
faced. My reward for that loyalty and faith and confidence and hope
and trust and honor and integrity has been an unmitigated disaster
for the people I represent, and for that I am profoundly
embarrassed, deeply ashamed, and bitterly dissapointed.
Best personal regards,
John S. Carr
President
NATCA
AFL-CIO