Update on Representation, Grievances, and Steward Training (2 of 2)

Our last update to you covered the financial side of the Trusteeship. As promised, this letter turns to the second and equally important part of our work: enforcing your contract and rebuilding the Local’s capacity to represent you.

Holding the Company Accountable on Discipline and Termination

Since the Trusteeship began, seven termination and discipline grievances have been carried through the grievance procedure and advanced to arbitration after the Company failed to resolve them internally. We are not naming individuals in this letter, but you should know the common threads running through these cases: discipline imposed without the written notice your contract requires; terminations carried out before the required investigation was complete; and pilots denied the right to Union representation during discipline meetings. Two additional cases from earlier in the Trusteeship are also now in arbitration on similar grounds. Each of these matters will be heard by a neutral arbitrator through the National Mediation Board process, exactly as your contract provides.

Systemic (Union) Grievances

Beyond individual cases, the Union has filed a series of grievances addressing patterns of Company conduct that affect the whole membership, not just one pilot:

• Written Notice of Discipline (Grievance 2026-004): The Company has a pattern of imposing discipline verbally or by phone without the written notice Article 9 requires. This grievance is now in arbitration.
• Scheduling Notice (Grievances 2026-008 and 2026-009): Two grievances challenge the Company’s failure to provide adequate notice before changing pilot schedules — one involving Pool Pilot shift rotations, the other Relief Pilot fixed rotations. Both are actively moving through the grievance procedure.
• Compelled Out-of-Region Assignments (Grievance 2026-001): After the Union grieved this practice, the Company voluntarily stopped it. We are currently working to secure a formal written agreement confirming that change, rather than relying on the Company’s informal word.
• RFI Non-Compliance (Grievance 2026-013): The Union has issued thirteen separate requests for information since November 2025 that the Company has failed to answer. This grievance was formally advanced to the next step this month.
• System Board Hearing Procedures (Grievance 2026-014): This grievance challenges how the Company has conducted recent System Board of Adjustment hearings, including inadequate hearing time and improper evidence presentation. It was also advanced to the next step this month.
• Monthly Reporting Compliance (Grievance 2026-015): Article 18.3 requires the Company to provide a monthly report of pilot status changes, including terminations. The Company stopped providing this report in March, undermining the Union’s ability to catch dues and status errors. This grievance was formally advanced to the next step this month.

Protecting Your Dues

Every dollar deducted from your paycheck should reach the Local accurately and on time. Our audit of the first quarter of 2026 identified 1,035 actionable discrepancies in the Company’s dues reporting, including active pilots for whom no dues were collected, “phantom” members appearing on remittance lists who were not on the actual staffing roster, and missing deductions. We filed Grievance 2026-010 to force correction of these errors, and it remains actively in process.

Making this worse, the Company has stopped producing the monthly Termination Report the contract requires — a report the Union relies on to catch exactly these kinds of errors (see Grievance 2026-015, above).

Building Your Steward Program

Stewards are the foundation of representation at the base level — typically the first point of contact a pilot has with the Union when a problem comes up at work, often before it ever becomes a formal grievance. A steward can walk you through your rights, accompany you into a meeting with management, and help determine whether an issue needs to move into the formal grievance process.

We are actively building this program back up. As of this writing, sixteen members have registered for steward training, and ten are actively enrolled in one or more of the four training courses now available. This work is still in its early stages, and we will share more as the program grows.

You do not need to become a steward to benefit from understanding how this process works. We encourage every member to take a look at the training materials, even just to understand your rights and what to expect if you ever need to use the grievance procedure. More information is available through our official channels.

We remain committed to full transparency as this work continues. If you have questions about anything in this letter, please reach out through the official channels described in our prior communications.

In Solidarity,
George Evans
Trustee, OPEIU Local 109