Lazy office dwellers vs lazy pilots

[Rotating Bacon]

last year I had to spend 2 months in the office due medical, after what I have seen there I can say the office rats won this one.
The people at the front (flying, serving, fixing, checking in etc.) work their asses off but in HQ nobody does, it should be filmed with a hidden camera, played back fast with the background music of Benny Hill.

[zk-dxb]

If 30 days leave is the minimum accorded by the Labour Law and since this year there are 13 Statutory Holidays for a total of 43 days - then the 42 days of contractual leave we are NOT getting is looking even worse compared to the Office Workers, or am I calculating this wrong/missing something obvious?

The Cabin Crew, who only get 30 days and NO statutory holidays have been really losing out on the deal since forever.

So, if an office worker gets 30 days a year, that's once every two month they can take 5 days leave, (sandwiched between the weekends), for a total of 9 days off. Every two months! Plus another (almost) 2 weeks of statutory holidays... All without the attendant tiredness of constantly rolling shift work, time zone changes and east/west adjustments.

Good thing we can now bid for 5 days off in a row.

[Twiglet1]

ZK
I normally say if you want office day hours and holidays go take an office job with the pay that goes with it. However in the case of EK pilots and cabin crew yeah that really is a pi%% take.

[THRCLB]

To add to the above ... They can take one day leave ...even a week before they need it not like us almost we submit our leave a year ahead and still some of us don't get it !,,,

[nolimitholdem]

It gets far, far worse.

Setting aside whether you actually receive 30 days, 42, whatever, for a moment. In those months where you do get some leave, you will fly pretty much a full roster's worth of credit anyway.

To my knowledge, when an office staffer takes leave, they are not required to work an extra hour or two a day or extra days of the week during their "non-leave" portion of the month to make up the hours "lost" during their leave. Which is in effect what flight deck/cabin crew are doing.

For the flight deck/cabin crew, it should not even be termed leave, it is simply guaranteed days off. Except:

- not as many as contractually required;
- never when you request it;
- and EK doesn't even keep to their own deadlines to publish it, making it impossible to plan ahead.

It's simply theft.

Why anyone would join under these conditions - for any reason, including being unemployed or from South Africa - is beyond me. There are simply too many better options if you wish to have a life.

[ExDubai]

including being unemployed or from South Africa - is beyond me.
Sounds like you're single......

[nolimitholdem]

Married or single, there are better options. Might not pay as well, but if that's the prime motivation for working for EK then that's that, I guess. If anything I can't even imagine functioning with any normality at EK with the additional challenges of family life, let alone single.

My friends kids cry every time they see him in uniform, because they know he's about to leave again after his "Dubai layover". When they come and jump on him at 7am after he's been asleep for a couple of hours they can't understand why he's too exhausted to play with them. Etc. If there was some hope that it might eventually improve, that would be something. Good luck, the trends are clear.

And yes, I concede the decisions are harder if you're married and have children. But hey, you make your choices and you live with the consequences.

[glofish]

Plus:

When do office seat cushion f@rters go to the doctor, the dentist? Right, they can only go during office hours, thus during work.
When do pilots go to the doctor, the dentist? Right, on a day off!

When do pilots go for the sit-in at the HQ for any silly stuff like visa, card renewal, rectification of a stuff-up by office clerks of any of the most trivial request? Right, on a day off!
When you sit and wait, you will discover how OSCF do that during working hours, even sometimes bypassing you under pretext they have to go back to Costas, because their co-workers are there on pause.

This perk takes out a nice 8 days off p.a. for me, at least .... :mad: