FlyTCI, part of me is gobsmacked about that questionnaire, but part of it just solidifies what I’ve been thinking would happen for the last couple of weeks.
My airline has furloughed most of it’s pilots, but no redundancies planned yet.
The trouble is that so many people in my airline (including the crew council) love the mantra of “You should be grateful to have a job”. The top management also love to say it too. So every time the management try to get more for less, it’s met with a “Well, if it keeps me in a job, then it’s fine by me”. In addition to “I’m sure there’d be people from Thomas Cook or flyBe who would kill for my job, so we’re lucky!”.
I don’t want to argue the semantics of this, because I’ve been made redundant in the past and know how it is. But, when people have the “I’m just grateful to have a job” mentality, T&Cs are only ever going to go one way.
And this mentality gets stronger in times of struggle. So it’s a vicious cycle. The more unemployed pilots on the market, the more the employed ones desperately cling to their jobs, and the bigger cuts they’re willing to take.
In the coming weeks, I’m expecting my company to implement either long-term unpaid leave (6-12 months), forced part-time, or even zero-hour hourly-paid contracts. We’ve already had a pay cut, which people believe to be temporary. My opinion is that we’re never getting that back. Ever. But, whatever gets implemented I know that a vast majority of my colleagues will just accept, shrug, and say “At least I’m still in a job”.