GA pulled off busy gate to bid for vacation
 

Hiya - bizarre experience at an AUS gate on Friday.
Flight to DEN was oversold by 8, and the agents were busy trying to sort things out. As I was speaking to one of the agents about a VDB, the other agent (who was speaking to a customer) got a call on her cell phone. I heard her say "I've got a situation here with involuntary denied boarding (or something like that), and it is really busy. What is my priorty?" She seemed to be arguing with whomever it was on the other end of the phone.
When she got off the phone, she told the colleague helping me that they are pulling her off to get her vacation bid in. The other GA was pissed, and said "they'd" better send one or two agents over. She then paged for additional help, and no one responded. She apologized to us, and advised that there were no supervisors or managers on site.
About 20 mins later, the agent came back after presumably getting her bid in, to a huge lineup of passengers.
Maybe I'm naive, but I'm shocked that someone was pulled off working the gate for such a ridiculous reason. Is it just me?
As an aside, I'm wishing I hadn't volunteered... more than 48 hrs after my luggage was loaded on the plane, and I still don't have it.

If the option is to stay at your post and not select a vacation, I'd be leaving the gate, too.

I worked for two different police departments that gave you 10 minute windows to select your vacation on a certain day. If you missed your window, the whole process did not stop for you and you went to the bottom of the list. Sounds like UA is handling it in a very similar way.

Maybe one of the UA employees here can share the consequences when you miss your vacation selection time.

So would I, but why put an employee in that position in the first place?

You'd think this would be the kind of thing that could be accomplished without requiring people to be present at a particular time. I.e. ask people to select weeks of vacation and prioritize them, then have software that runs through those requests in priority order.

Can't imagine there isn't some service out there that exists to do this.

You'd be surprised what kind of procedures are in a lot of contracts.

While what you say makes sense, a union would not just agree to it without getting something in return. For example, if employees were given 10 minutes a quarter to bid on vacation, and you want to convert it to an online system that can be done from work or home, the union will fight for compensation for its members for the 40 minutes a year.

With 85,000 employees, assuming an average wage of $25/hour, the union will label this as a $1.4 million productivity savings on the backs of its members and will want something for it.

Dreaded vacation, etc. bid time. Happens often. Bid exactly on time or lose it.

#flyerfriendly

What has UA done in years past that we're just hearing about a problem from a customer today? Maybe the selection process has worked successfully at each station and today there just happened to be a staff and manager shortage at this particular airport that called attention to it. Probably wouldn't even know they were selecting vacations today if they didn't have the personnel shortage.

if i was the company, i'd just subcontract all the gate agent jobs then. i mean, if you're gonna operate that way, why bother being employees.

They did exactly that at a number of stations this year, including Rochester and Grand Rapids.
Help your United agents who help you (Outsourcing)

It's been done this way for as long as i've been with UA. Both pre-union and post. You are given a time to bid your vacation, and another day and time to bid your schedule. If you miss your slot, they don't stop the process, they call the next person up. As vacation times are prime around summer and holidays, and then slowly fill outward from there leaving at the end, only late Jan-Fen and the 1st week in Dec for the most junior employees, you don't want to miss your slot as someone else will deffinitly take the "best" of what remains. At my station, I can do it on the phone as well, but you hope that nothing goes wrong with your connection, that the phone lines aren't busy (there are alot of employees at my station.) I prefer to do it in person, and will drive in on my day off, stay late or come in early if my slot is off shift. An online system with UA's IT? We would trust it far less than the phone, and again, that is less than in person. Heck, our new contracts gave us a raise on Nov 1, but it still isn't reflected in any of our pay checks, do you think we would trust an online system

Why would anyone assume it's a union thing or that an annual vacation is bid in quarterly instalments? Also, you bid at your time, be it on shift or off shift. For the majority of people, it is off shift as one only works 40 hrs on average a week, a minority percentage of the time the bid is open. Plus, we are given 5 min, not 10, so instead of 40 min a year (10 min x 4 quarters) it is 5 min total. of which most employees aren't even getting paid. Hardly a "union thing"

I've got about 20 years, have earned 4 weeks of vacation, and I still can't get a single week in the summer or a week that contains a major holiday. Why? They are peak times for travel, the company allocates less because they need coverage, and I am in the full time pool, still on the bottom half of the seniority list.

Now this is indeed ridiculous. When the government was reopened after the shutdown, we got our back pay in the next scheduled pay check. If the government can do something like that in less than 2 weeks, why can't United?

This thread reminds me why I'm glad I'm not in a customer-facing role. I can't imagine the thought of 'bidding' for vacation. How am I supposed to know when the next mistake fare is going to occur????

GA pulled off busy gate to bid for vacation
 

Ah - if the window to bid on vacation is so short, can't blame the lady for leaving. Not that I blamed her in the first place; she was obviously told to do so.

This is either a union thing or a management thing. My vote is for union.

Second, if I had an employee shooting his mouth off on a public Internet forum about him not liking his benefits, I'd fire him.