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donpizmeov
22nd Jan 2014, 14:13
I am thinking we have a new winner in the worse leave bid year stakes. This one may even outdo the horses "we set a target of 30 days per pilot and almost made it" year.

I really hope the grown ups don't have to suffer the same inconvenience.

(I didn't really mean that last bit )

The Don

myekppa
22nd Jan 2014, 15:00
Agreed, I think we're up to version 7.08.09

Is it just me or is anyone else confused as to what's going on with leave?

Not that I plan on using too much staff travel....

Outatowner
22nd Jan 2014, 19:10
Don, it's not too surprising as they did just recently do away with their own system of secondary bids and introduce some new, unprecedented, "Ad Hoc" program of partial year bids in place of the previous annual secondary bid process.

They cancelled previous bids, turning the established program on its head and replacing it with another "from the hip" patch-work program which suits no one other than them. Najoums all around.

If we operated airplanes the same way we'd be fired.

Plazbot
22nd Jan 2014, 22:45
Specifically, how many days do EK drivers get as leave per year and is there a requirement to take a number of consecutive days as a minimum once per year?

BigGeordie
22nd Jan 2014, 23:07
We get 42 days- 30 days annual leave and 12 days in lieu of public holidays. We have to take 30 days as a minimum (unless the company decides to give us less).

Leave can be peak (school holidays, basically) or non-peak. Minimum during peak is 2 weeks, max is 4 weeks. During non-peak minimum is 4 days. If you don't get any peak leave one year you are supposed to get priority for the next year.

We only get one firm annual leave ticket per year per family member but as you can see it is impossible to take less than 2 periods of leave per year- you are allowed a maximum of 4 periods of leave.

glofish
23rd Jan 2014, 02:27
Yes, but remember, you are a semi-government worker!

That means just about nothing more than ...... any kind of rules they invented the last two minutes apply to you. Or to put it more mildly, you are almost a volunteer to enhance our dear rulers wallet and sustain all his distant cousins and nephews who think, during their golf-round or escapades to some disco in their muscle car, you are stealing from the company and country when you are on leave.

Gulf News
23rd Jan 2014, 08:29
Dear Captain Gulf News

Thank you for you email regarding the leave bidding system and staff travel. At Emirates we like to believe we are industry leaders especially in the field of Human Resources so let me take time to explain the system to you. Primary leave bidding for the year April 2014 to March 2015 opened in November and closed in December. It is not our fault that only 5% of pilots received any of the leave they bid for this is due to tough market conditions and currency fluctuations that are putting pressure on the companies ambitions to make a billion dollar profit this financial year. We then opened and closed the Secondary leave bidding without allocating any leave and replaced this with an ad hoc bidding round which saw a further 2% of pilots awarded leave. To keep everyone on their toes we then introduced a further round of Ad hoc bidding for the A330/340 fleet and delayed the final round for all fleets with the aim of ensuring that at least a further 2% of the pilot workforce gets leave. Our aim other than to confuse and cloud the issue to such an extent that nobody really know if they have leave or not is to ensure that the deficiencies of the manpower planners become your problem not ours.

Whilst this may be time consuming once again it is your time and not ours. We know that you will have a lot of time on your hands anyway as due to the runway closure and subsequent reduction in flights no seats will be available for ALTs. This in addition to the recently highly popular introduction of enhanced travel benefits means that you wont be going anywhere anyway. If data shows that you can still afford to avail of staff travel with the newly introduced fares matrix then this will be addressed later in the year when the annual salary review is announced.

Looking ahead you will be happy to know that for next year EEJITS have produced a state of the art leave-bidding App for mobile devices. You will be able to download it from Spring by using your staff number and epin coupled with your mother’s maiden name and four simple security questions, an attested copy of your passport, UAE ID card and four passport photographs with a blue background. The app will be very user friendly and is being trialled at the moment by the same people that conducted the user trials on the new uniform. It is of little consequence that the people who conduct these trails will never have to use the system and have little idea of the practicalities involved, the main aim is to be able to write a glowing article in SAFAR about how clever we are.

I hope this goes some way to explaining our position. In closing may I quote from a soon to be formalised amendment to the Employee regulation manual which will state. If you don’t like it you know where the door is.

Sincerely (not Really)

H R Numpty

donpizmeov
23rd Jan 2014, 08:44
Absolute gold GN. But sadly true.


I sent an email and the auto response stated the recipient was away on leave. I think Alanis Morissette has written songs about things not even as perverse as this.


The Don

flareflyer
23rd Jan 2014, 08:46
sorry for the silly question.....
are the leave award now today???
I mean....
i got 0 days the first bid and it seams 0 days also on this ad hoc session.......
Or maybe are not yet published???:ugh::ugh:

skysod
23rd Jan 2014, 09:13
Don't know what you're all on about ....had my full leave allocation for the year approved since begining of January! :)

CAYNINE
23rd Jan 2014, 09:40
well aren't you a clever sod. (couldn't resist)

stable_checked
23rd Jan 2014, 09:47
I'm not working for EK yet but just to make sure i've got this right. Despite the fact that you have 42 days of leave (sounds great when i read it under the benefits section) you cannot take it in blocks of 7 days or blocks of 10 days?
Also as you operate on a random roster, if you get a block of 7 days are there any wrap around days attached to it to make it a longer break or could they roster you to work until your last day and then roster you to work on your first day back?

BigGeordie
23rd Jan 2014, 10:16
You can (and sometimes do) work until 23:59 the day before your leave. You will get one day off after your leave (regardless of how long it is) to make sure you are back in Dubai the required 12 hours before your next duty starts. Sometimes you will have to travel back on your last rostered day of leave- you can be at work at 06:00 2 days after your leave finishes.

You can take 4 blocks of 10 days off but none of it could be peak. You can't take 4 blocks of 7 days as that wouldn't add up to 30 days- two blocks of 8 days and 2 of 7 would work but again none of it could be peak.

Ketek400
23rd Jan 2014, 10:28
And now they will force leave on A330 fleet in May and June! Screw your plans for any holidays you want!!!

Message to all those thinking of joining, think before you leave a good job back home!!!!

skysod
23rd Jan 2014, 11:28
Perhaps I ought to point out...I do not work for EK.......but the thread title does not mention any particular airline!!!........there ARE others in the ME besides EK!!

flareflyer
23rd Jan 2014, 12:04
Skysod you are totally wright.
There is not only emirates...and i would say that for how things are going here now I would suggest all the new joiners to think twice..........:ugh::ugh:

stable_checked
23rd Jan 2014, 14:32
So during a year i will take 30 as a minimum but entitlement is 42, so do I or do I not get 42?
So during peak i can only take a minimum of 14 days and a maximum of 28?
During off-peak minimum 4 days but no maximum?
So can i take 2 blocks of 14 days during peak periods and 2 blocks of 7 days during off peak to reach the 42 days?
Can i take 7 blocks of 7 days during off peak periods to reach the 42 days?
Can i take 2 blocks of 12 days and 1 block of 10 days and 2 block of 4 days all during off peak periods?

I will appreciate the answers to these questions.

donpizmeov
23rd Jan 2014, 15:18
Rather than waste a lot of bandwidth Stable, I will try and keep it simple. You will get, when available and when it suits the company, the min of 30 days leave per year. If you are lucky you may get more. You may get leave when you ask for it, but sometimes you will get the leave that the company thinks would be better for you. They call this forced leave. It normally comes in blocks of 4 days, which on a ordinary month would be called days off.


Luckily, regardless of how many days off..oops I mean leave , you get per month, you will still be able to fly the required 92hrs.


There are no answers to your leave permutation questions. Because it just depends. We do not know what it depends upon though.


It would seem that this runway thing is being blamed for the Leave "problems" this year. I now feel very embarrassed as I knew about the runway closure last year. I apologise to you all for not letting those in charge of leave planning know about it.


The Don

TangoUniform
23rd Jan 2014, 16:55
Am I misunderstanding the latest leave change letter? My reading of it was that the ad hoc rebid was to be published today.

SubsonicMortal
23rd Jan 2014, 17:45
Exactly. Why is it not published!?

falconeasydriver
23rd Jan 2014, 18:19
Because Sub, it would most likely go something like this…

"The leave planners shall not be liable for injury or damage to or destruction or loss of leave or any other property arising out of or incidental to or in connection with or occurring during the provision of the leave or for the mis-delivery or nondelivery of the bid and whether or not caused or contributed to by the default (including negligence) of the leave planners or any agent, servant or officer of the airline or any other person entitled to the benefit of these conditions"

And if you don't like it…..

BigGeordie
23rd Jan 2014, 20:09
Stable, I'll try and answer your questions but as Don said the answer to most of them is "maybe, maybe not".

30 days is the legal minimum. You might get more than this. You might not. If you don't, the days you don't get will be carried over into the next year when you might or might not get them. And so on....

Peak leave, min 14, max 28 days.

Off peak min 4 days, max 35 (I think) otherwise you have recency problems as you need one take off and landing within that time. It is impossible to take all your leave in one chunk anyway.

You can only have one period of peak leave in a year. Some years you will get no peak leave.

You can only take 4 leave periods in a year, including your peak one if you get it.

I hope that makes some kind of sense. The rules are archaic and seemingly random.

Praise Jebus
24th Jan 2014, 07:16
There's rules???

stable_checked
24th Jan 2014, 12:36
Thank you all for clearing things up.

Its annoying to read that they offer 42 days of leave which sounds great, but now with your explanations i doubt the integrity off the system, yet the number of days i will actually be able to get. I am also surprised that you can only take a maximum of 4 periods of leave. All these problems really limit the way you can use that huge entitlement of 42 days.

It sounds more like leave is just a way of getting guaranteed days off especially if you say you can still fly to the maximum hours and the fact that there are no wrap around days. It seems like leave is what it would have been days off in a month, but you can hope to control your days off at 4 times in a year.

stable_checked
24th Jan 2014, 13:35
Does anyone know if the same applies to your neighbor carrier?

myekppa
24th Jan 2014, 18:30
Umm, no.

That's because we spend so much time working for our own airline, we don't have time, the resources, nor inclination to ask questions of the other one on your behalf.

Rather Be Skiing
26th Jan 2014, 05:27
I just noticed on the portal if I look at: Crew information>My Records>Leave it shows I have leave I requested in the Adhoc bid.

donpizmeov
26th Jan 2014, 05:32
Good find there Skiing.

stealthpilot
26th Jan 2014, 10:36
21 days forced leave (obviously for 330/340 crew only) which has to be taken during runway closure ...... in addition to a reserve month every 5 months :ugh:
Fabulous!

Yossarian
27th Jan 2014, 23:46
For my last few leave periods the rostering has been very consistent. I have returned from a ULR within a few hours of my leave starting. Generously, I have been allocated the days off I've requested after the leave, which, unfortunately, has preceded a ULR flight, which means I have to be in Dubai to acclimatise on those days. And if its anything less than a week of leave, requested or forced, expect to do 80+ hours.

As far as I'm concerned, so very subjectively, the leave system and rostering system would be a joke, if it wasn't so similar to being raped. I would believe I'd been unlucky if it didn't happen so often.

120feet
29th Jan 2014, 07:46
I have been reading a lot of posts about EK, and from what I can tell this latest idea of forcing 330/340 pilots to use their vacation is a massive cost saving technique. Pilots are allotted 42 days a year. 42/365= 11.5% So 11.5% of pilots days are vacation days. Meaning, if EK pilots had no vacation, EK would need 11.5% fewer pilots. Forcing you to take 50% of your vacation days on days the fleet isn't flying means they essentially need 5.75% fewer pilots. (Half of 42 days or 11.5%) So if the 330/340 fleet has 500 pilots they now need about 30 fewer pilots to operate this fleet.

I am not an EK pilot so excuse the round numbers. Say a pilot costs $200,000 a year. (Including housing, medical, et al) They would save 6 million for the year. But this also means they have to hire 30 fewer pilots so they save on the cost of interviewing and training these as well. (This would be offset by the cost of any fleet transfers that will occur.)

My guess is you will shortly see a large transfer of pilots off this fleet. This being said, the 330/340 pilots are not being forced into "vacation" but merely days off. Any pilot who has kids will not be pulling them out of school for 3 weeks towards the end of the term. Also, if there are fewer flights now operating I would assume those flights remaining are all oversold. This makes getting out of Dubai completely impracticable, which means these are days off not vacation.

Vacation is relaxing on a beach with mai ties or skiing with the family, not driving to and from school on the daily school run. It has been proven that mistakes decrease and productivity increases when meaningful vacation is taken. I would imagine this forced "vacation" to have an opposite effect, as this adds stress to the 330/340 pilot group. Balance this safety issue with the $6 million saved. Simply stated, it appears to have taken EK a bit of time to figure out how to share the pain of the runway closure with its pilots.