Trustee Update – August 5, 2024

Allegiant Pilots:

Last week saw the completion of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) audit and the filing of union charges against former Local 2118 Executive Board officials. I know you are eager for more details and I will be able to share more on this soon. We continued mediated negotiations via Zoom over the Union’s presentation of Sections 14 and 16. Additionally, we were engaged with the company regarding restarting the FOQA program; we hope we can resolve FOQA this week.

Committee Training Updates

This week, your Safety Committee members will be at Embry Riddle University, attending three days of Basic and Advanced Go Team Training. Students will learn on-scene investigative techniques, biohazard protection, working group duties, and other subjects necessary to participate in an NTSB accident investigation. Upon completion of the three-day course, graduates will be qualified to represent Local 2118 as a party to an NTSB investigation. The training course is known as the premier course of its kind in the pilot union world.

On Wednesday, your Stewards will be attending Steward Training; this is the first professional training opportunity your Steward have had since the Allegiant pilots were represented by Local 1224.

As a reminder, an updated committee list is available on the APA 2118 website, and you can always get a quick response by emailing stewards@apa2118.org.

Our Website and Union Impact

We have entered into an agreement with our web developer to upscale our website dramatically. Our goal is to transition the site to a more centralized hub with data-driven tools and improved two-way communications. Updates will occur in multiple phases, here is a quick look at what you can expect.

Phase I – It was important to us that Phase I development incorporate features that would bolster two-way communications between the membership and our committees. As you may have noticed, we recently rolled out a Frequently Asked Questions section on the website, that gives you a portal for searching common questions and a direct point of contact for asking questions that haven’t been asked.

The next part of Phase I will be incorporating a message board into the site, as well as an improved Document Library so that you can readily search and find agreements and other documents.

Phase II – We will begin working towards a centralized management system and building out several membership and committee processes that will provide some tools for our staff and officers for more effectively running our Local. This phase also builds the foundation for Phase III.

Phase III – We will begin looking to incorporate some of our existing processes such as grievances and flight pay loss requests into a single sign-on.

We will update you as we begin rolling out some of the improved features and functionality.

SharePoint & Committee Collaboration

We are in the implementation phase of developing SharePoint sites as a central repository for our Local leadership and committees to coordinate with each other, save documents, training materials, and archive data. This central hub will help ensure our committees are operating in an environment designed encourage collaboration and preserve work product as members transition on and off committees.

The Negotiating Committee was the first up, and now has modern database structure, contract library, and calendar designed for collaboration. Our goal is that all committees will benefit from a shared site.

Assistant Trustee Captain Jim Clark

I want to end this update with a shout-out to Jim. As some of you know, Jim was the principal officer for Local 357 (Republic pilots), before coming to Allegiant. His experience, insight, and attention to detail have been invaluable in our first months of trusteeship. He is not only assisting with policies, procedures, and auditing work, but these last two weeks he has also helped shop for a new local office, driving by at least 33 properties and narrowing it down to eight, all of which have had at least one complete site inspection. Jim produced a “details of options” document that looked at all of the pros, cons, and economics of each one. As a reminder, we received notice last month that our lease expires at the end of September.

Upcoming Base Visits

TYS
Tuesday, August 6 at 6:00 p.m.
Jig and Reel
101 Central St., Knoxville, TN 37902

AVL
Wednesday, August 7 at 6:00 p.m.
Post 25 Kitchen and Lounge
2155 Hendersonville Rd., Arden, NC 28704

R.S.V.P. to Karen VanNostrand at KVanNostrand@apa2118.org.

Fraternally,

Greg Unterseher, Trustee