Contract 3

Tier wage system must be destroyed Local 100 contract of 2012 should not accept dual wages structure as part of it’s contract concession bargaining. This may be suitable in other industries in which two-tier systems have been adopted such as airlines, trucking, retail grocery and automobile manufacturing. However our contract having this dual tier wage structure is harmful to the membership and it benefits the employer.

A two tier wage system establishes two pay scales in the company, a lower one for a newly hired workers and a higher one for existing employees. They can be either temporary or permanent. In a temporary system such as ours new employees are hired at a lower wage than employees that were hired earlier, but over time can advance to the top pay scale. In some recent contracts in the trucking industry, for example new hires are paid at 70 percent of the going rate of the hourly pay, but must be brought up to the full rate after 3 years.

In a permanent system, new workers start at a lower wage scale and never reach parity. An example is in the airline industry where at one company ‘B-scale’ flight attendants begin at $972 a month and peak at $1,199 a month in their 5th year, whereas ‘A-scale’ attendants employed prior to fifteen years started at $1,194 a month, and reached $1,837 in the 5th year, and toped out at $2,217 a month in the 12th year.

This ridculous two tier wage systems were accepted by unions in situations where employers might have gone out of business or substantially reduced employment without wage relief. The savings for employers are often substantial - approximately $100 million a year for American Airlines, for example. Confronted with a demand for concessions, unions often found a two tier system the easiest to grant, since the existing membership lost nothing and new workers who bore the cost had no vote in the contract ratification process. In our situation Samuelsen who is a Toussaint protege and loyalist with the current leadership of TBOU - Local 100 could not help new hires in the layoff.

This absurd two tier wage systems may save some jobs, but it also has a number of drawbacks. Low morale and higher turnover among new employees is a cost employers pay. Phony unions such as our Local 100 which has accepted this two tier wage system under Samuelsen and TBOU, are aware that it could destroy the membership’s solidarity and violate the principle of equal pay for equal work. For us workers, the principal drawback is that a two tier system leads to considerable divisiveness - the new employees resent earning less than the older workers, while the older workers fear that the new employees will take their jobs.

We recommend this two tier wage system must be abolished, in the contract of 2012, we believe Mr. Steve Downs, Chair, T/O division, who is an excellent, skilled, haggler and negotiator who always fights for solidarity will accomplish this task.