UA Fan

+1 especially with the police.

DENviaLAX

If management sets up the bidding process in that way, where it requires the employee to complete this obligation during their shift, then it's on management to schedule the staff accordingly. IMO it sounds like that GA should have never been assigned to that trip in the first place, so it's definitely not her fault that she left. If it's her time to bid, I believe she has every right to be there to do it. They should have either staffed an additional agent for that trip so that there would still be adequate help when she had to leave, or as I said before, never put her on it in the first place and had someone else to work it. Maybe they didn't have enough staff there for that to be possible, but if that's the case, then it doesn't really make sense that they're laying off a couple hundred more people soon. Hard to say I guess, doesn't really make sense to me.

Reisen

+1. I'm normally as anti-union as they come, but this is clearly on UA management. The GA did nothing wrong.

I'd contact MP about it and complain. Let them know the customer is the one paying for their poor system.

Alpha Golf

And you think they care that customers waited longer in line? Really? Our United?

sinoflyer

This is neither union nor management. As fastair alluded to briefly, many employees prefer the manual bidding system because you can see the vacation/shift calendar in real time. A computerized system cannot do that.

It certainly sounds silly that an employee would get pulled away from duty in order to bid for vacation, but it's a part of the working environment and really not that dissimilar to, say, FAA's (nonunion) mandatory 10-hour rest for pilots, not a minute less. The first morning flight could be fully boarded and ready to go, but the pilots wouldn't show up until minutes later because they had arrived a little late the previous night.