Originally Posted by
virginblue
They are getting paid for three months from an insolvency fund and so should be fine. Just like almost anyone else, pilots are not career civil servants with guaranteed lifelong employment, so redundancy is a risk they share with all employees who have to pay bills, mortgages.
The amount of money guaranteed however is less than half of the normal salary for pretty much all pilots at air berlin. So no, their pay isn't guaranteed.
Originally Posted by
virginblue
Calling in sick is reportedly a small group of captains on very generous former LTU contracts. They are not taking the "we enjoyed it while it lasted" (i.e. for decade since LTU disappeared) approach, but expect to keep the conditions with a future employer. With is quite understandable from their perspective - but realistically, they are not the ones calling the shots. What they apparently fear is that because of their fat cat salaries airberlin and the potential investor want to get rid of them by way of closing down longhaul ops which would give airberlin the opportunity to make them lawfully redundant before the company is taken over by someone else. Bit like brushing up the high maintenance bride...
Again, not entirely correct. Yes, there are quite a few ex LTU captains in that group, but they are not alone there by far. And they do not have better contracts than the rest of the airberlin pilots, in fact the last LTU contract is around 40% less pay than the current airberlin contract. And since airberlin has no exclusive longhaul fleet but rather only MFF (mixed fleet flying) there is no way one can fire only those old LTU guys, however, prospective buyers of parts of the company could of course cherry pick, which they cannot anymore if a normal germany procedure called Sozialauswahl (social selection) would be followed. And the sick out is only about going into that social selection procedure, which is governed by employment law.