Team,
As we enter the fourth week of the strike, we’d like to provide an important status update on labor negotiations and our ongoing business continuity plan.
For more than ten months, we’ve worked to negotiate a new labor agreement that provides good paying jobs for our associates and meets the changing needs of our company. Here’s a brief recap of those efforts:
• June 22, 2015. We delivered a comprehensive proposal on the first day of bargaining in an effort to reach an agreement in a timely fashion.
• August 1, 2015. Contracts expired; associates began working without a contract.
• August 2015 to mid-April 2016. We made numerous additional comprehensive proposals and took part in over 300 meetings with union officials.
• April 11, 2016. Unions announced their plan to strike in two days.
• April 11-12, 2016. The Federal Mediation the union leaders rejected the offer.
• April 13, 2016: Strike begins.
• April 28, 2016: Fifteen days into the strike, after more than ten months of negotiations, and with no meaningful post-strike engagement by union leadership, we presented our last, best, final offer.
We believe our last offer addresses many of the unions’ concerns around wages, job security, retirement, and healthcare benefits. And yet five days have passed since we delivered it, and we have seen no constructive movement from the union.
With this as our context, we want to update you on the implementation of the next phase of our contingency plan.
Since we began contingency planning more than two years ago, we’ve known we needed to be prepared for a prolonged strike.
Our plan calls for resources to be ramped up over time, as a strike continues. As part of that ramp process you will now see a significant scale up of our contingency workforce, with the addition of contractors, expanding outsourced call center resources, additional EWAs, and the hiring of new temporary workers. Thousands of these resources will be sourced into the organization, trained and deployed over the next few weeks.
As this phase ramps up and the expanded force attains steady-state productivity, we will have the opportunity to reduce the burden presently carried by our current EWA team. The purpose of this email is to provide our EWAs with a clear understanding of how we’ll manage the business and your assignments in the immediate term, and some sense for what comes next.
What will happen between now and the end of the quarter?
Given the start of this next planned phase, employees can expect to be on their EWA through June 30. While hours of operation vary by organization, local supervisors will provide weekly schedules and tour shifts.
As previously communicated, EWA employees will continue to work 12 hours per day and six days per week. In some cases, we’ve reduced the hours per shift that employees work. We have begun to allow consecutive days off to allow employees – particularly those posted remotely, to travel home. Every three weeks, employees may be scheduled additional days off based on how long it takes them to travel (between two and four days). You’ll find more information on this in your EWA handbook. This is a priority for us and we’ll look to maintain this process through the quarter.
Also important – please note, if an EWA team member requires a day or part of a day off due to a life event (e.g. graduation, wedding, etc.), their local manager will make every effort to accommodate the request.
What about vacations?
As a reminder, no new time-off requests through June 30 will be considered, unless for a major life event. If you have pre-approved time off prior to June 30, we ask that you consider rescheduling for a future date.
Additionally, since the duration of the work stoppage is unknown, we’re asking employees not to book vacations in July and August. We will provide more specific guidance on this later in the quarter as the situation evolves.
What should you expect in the longer term?
As the augmented workforce enters the business throughout this month and next, we will begin to reduce the load that our current EWAs are carrying. This will allow us to begin reducing hours and days worked and ultimately to introduce a rotational work schedule. Our initial focus in this phase will be to reduce time away from home for our remote-based EWA employees. We’ll also gauge interest from employees who may be willing to stay on an EWA full time.
Further on, we will begin the process of returning our overall EWA community to their normal jobs. It’s important to note that this will not happen overnight, but we anticipate a steady ramping down of the size of the load and the burden this puts upon our EWA teams.
Questions?
It’s important to keep an open dialog. Click here to email us your questions and we will help you get the answers you need.
Finally, and most importantly, know that we understand the challenges you’re facing, and deeply appreciate the efforts all of you are making to care for our customers and sustain our business. We will continue to update status and critical developments in the weeks ahead.
Bob and Tami