IF......
Perhaps if our company “leadership” had put all of the affordable ex-gratia payment money into a pot and divided it evenly into a numbers of days pay for every employee (similar time how Profit Share was once payed a long time ago...) then every employee would have got X days of pay as an ex-gratia payment.
But NO, they decided to cap the payment at HK$30000, thereby disproportionately affecting all pilots and senior cabin crew. So a Captain gave away 3 weeks of pay and that equally important office worker who is apparently a more important piece of the machine got the full 13th month.
Step forward to now, and the office worker sees the SLS as simply giving back ¾ of the 13th month and getting a few weeks off work. The Captains perspective is that they have already donated 3 weeks of pay via the 13th month cap and now the company wants another 3 weeks pay.
What IF our “leaders” hadn’t been so vindictive with the ex-gratia methodology /13th month cap? Perhaps there would have been a bigger take up in the SLS already? Lessons to be learned for this “stronger company “ that will emerge from this event?