11.03.23 – APFA ORD Base Brief – December 2023 Staffing and Allocations

December 2023 ORD Staffing and Allocations

Friday, November 3, 2023

December bidding is here, the last month of 2023!

Continue to give a warm Chicago welcome to our new hire flight attendants! The last two classes of 2023 will be doing indoc later in the month. We hope to receive more new hires in the 2024 hiring period, which should resume in the spring.

As a reminder, ORD has a new centralized phone number to reach your base reps:

Critical Period – Attendance

December has a critical period for bidding, considered “critical” December 22nd-January 3rd.  Chargeable absences during this period will have one added attendance point applied.

During this same period, if you work all of your assignments/RAPs and do not have an absence, you will be given an incentive credit applied to future absences. Read about the critical period on page 7 of the Flight Attendant Attendance & Performance Program. You may also email the Crew Attendance Managers at [email protected].

Holiday Pay 

There are holiday incentive days in December. Review the recent APFA Hotline for more information about holiday pay: APFA Holiday Pay.

Allocations

The trip lengths for ORD are more balanced than the November bid packet. We are happy to see an increase in both turns and 2-days. Although we hope both turns and two days will increase further in the future, we are happy to see it in December!

We continue to ask for more turns, as we know there is a desire for more.

ODANs are up only slightly from November, up to 8.8 starts per day.

Staffing

With every holiday month, staffing is a hot topic. Although December has 4 days qualifying for the holiday incentive pay, the company telling us we have “better reliability” than previous years, and improved absenteeism in Chicago, the reserve numbers are still much higher than they need to be.

With lower block hours than November, lower absenteeism rates, many new hires and holiday incentive pay, the company should give a lower percentage on RSV. This would create more line holders, and benefit everyone with more flexibility in PBS…. The company response is they don’t want a single person on reserve who doesn’t need to be.

The company explanation on the RSV numbers was lacking in rationale. They told us that they did see value in the holiday incentive days in 2022. They advised they do take the holiday incentive days into account for 2023. They acknowledged that our block hours are down.

The reserve percentage for Chicago is 24.5% vs system average of 23.7%

The expected line average for Chicago at PBS open is expected to be 79.1 vs the system average of 80.4.

Sequence Starts Per Day

Trip Construction

• 1-day: 24% in December vs 19% in November
• 2-day: 28% in December vs 22% in November
• 3-day: 43% in December vs 55% in November
• 4 plus-day: 5% in December vs. 4% in November
• ODAN Starts per day: 8.8 in December vs 7.6 in November

PBS Preliminary Manning Plan

In Solidarity,

Dray Howard
APFA ORD Base President
(630) 215-8410
[email protected]

Justin Patterson
APFA ORD Base Vice President
(509) 720-0067
[email protected]