Excellent Article YP. Thanks.
You mention the issue of adjustment of CC duty times to squeeze their productivity after leave. In effect deliberately planning to compress rosters with regulatory approval!
This is practiced with the Flight Deck too. It is not uncommon to see rosters at 85 hours that contain 4 or more days of leave. Some years back the company removed the process that ensured rosters were balanced in months containing leave. Namely a credit of 2.7 hours for each day of leave. The cost therefore prevented roster compression.
Whether one views it as using leave as days off, cheating pilots out of pro-rata productivity or whatever way you chose, it all results in roster compression and in effect the pilots give their leave back to the company for no remuneration. No wonder the company won't allow bidding of days off after leave. They want you to work your leave back.
In fact nothing actually stops the company from assigning 3 blocks of leave of 14 days with each crossing over 2 months. 7 days at the end of one and 7 at the beginning of another. In all the months they could easily roster to the productivity threshold and pay nothing. Presto: The whole leave balance is wiped out for the year.
Short blocks of assigned leave achieve this to some measure. The very reason our rostering system does not work optimally and our leave process is inflexible is the deliberate targeting of rosters with leave to achieve high productivity and avoid the associated payment. Next time you don't get that Seattle trip in top bid, it likely went to someone who had leave that month to push him to the threshold.
Anyone knows that taking a few days of leave in a month is simply giving it back to the company. They will likely roster to full productivity threshold and not pay a dirham.
Assuming they achieve 20 hours over a year above the monthly pro-rata productivity for each captain that is a saving of 12700. If they do that to 2000 captains they have saved over 25M. It's around 20M for the FO's. Not a bad return for making pilots work their leave back with compressed rosters before or after leave.
I'm sure it would raise a stink in the office if they had to work weekends to make up for the hours they missed on leave! Not even sure if it would be legal.
With everyone bidding long blocks of leave to avoid being ripped off if they only take a few days, the whole of the leave bidding system becomes less flexible.
As you say YP, this channels money to the top. Right out of the pockets of the workers. To "do the right thing" or to respect "our team" and manage productivity proportionately on a pro-rata basis might seem to hurt the bottom line but I think in reality it would motivate the workers to higher profits, curtail the experience drain and ultimately benefit "The Brand". No one likes to be ripped off. Why can't big profitable companies play fair?