YOUR DUES, YOUR ANSWERS

  • No. Union pay is called “Flight Pay Loss” and it is designed to cover union representatives for the loss of company provided income when they are on union leave. This pay is in lieu of, not in addition to.

  • Yes, there are times when a union representative receives pay above guarantee. These are times when work is done on awarded days off when the crew member would otherwise be free from Atlas duty and spending time at home.

  • Union Business Pay, or UB Days, are paid when representatives are on leave from the company for union work, or working on days off. They pay out 5 hours regardless of how much actual work is done.

    For example, stewards at a grievance hearing will earn 5 hours when they might be in the offices for more than that. Crew Desk members are paid 5 hours for a full 24 hour shift.

  • While the data is available in the LM-2 filings, they are not easy to find or read. We believe the best way is to lay it all out.

    We have lay bare the expenses your dues paid in 2025 for your Secretary-Treasurer nominee to the right of this page.

  • If there’s one thing we all know, pilots don’t get paid by the hour. An 11 hour duty day might get us 7-8 hours actual pay. For union business it can be worse. Crew Desk shifts pay 5 hours for a full 24 hour day.

    For office staff to operate the crew desk - after extensive training, of course - we would require three 8-hour shifts, or 24 hours of compensation for every day. While many of the Crew Desk staff are First Officers, let’s take a look at a senior Captain working the desk at $300/hr. That crew member will be paid $1,500.

    To hire office workers to cover that, they would need to be paid no more than $1,500/24 = 62.50 an hour just to break even. We can certainly pay less, but remember the intent is to keep and maintain a qualified office staff, not pay just above minimum wage to workers looking for basic job exprience at a revolving door office. Whose expertise would you rather have?

You have asked for transparency. This is your nominee for Secretary-Treasurer being transparent.

In 2025, your nominee for Secretary-Treasurer earned almost $91,000 as a union steward. The question is, obviously, how? And was this on top of Atlas Pay? Is this your dues money well spent?

First, don’t be fooled by the number on the far right. This includes reimbursement for hotels and meals spent while on union business. In January he spent $66.46 in meals and $1431.54 on a hotel for several nights for an annual steward meeting. In July he spent $403.24 for two nights’ hotel for a Step 1 grievance preparation and hearing, and again the same amount in late October, totalling $2304.48, the same number you see on the LM-2 as “Disbursements for Official Business.” We pay out-of-pocket for expenses while travelling and are later reimbursed once receipts are submitted and scrutinized.

His actual amount of union pay is $90,930, which is 66 days Union Business (UB Pay). Of these, 17 were for Steward-On-Duty in July and 17 in October. As his schedule was entirely wiped, the company paid zero, nothing. The union compensated only for 17 days lost pay, not 17 days on top of min guarantee. This while being on call from 0000z on the first day of the month to 2359z on the last day of the month.

The rest comes from time spent on awarded days-off for steward meetings, grievance hearings, and crew desk shifts - time spent working hard to recover crew members’ pay lost through corporate CBA violations.

This doesn’t even consider the several hundreds of volunteer hours dedicated to answering crew member concerns, investigating violations, attempting to solve informally, and writing and filing grievances.

This is the bare minimum of transparency, this is the least we can offer you, this is our pledge to you, accountability and transparency for where your hard-earned wages are going.