Originally Posted by
Slasher1
In at least one of the jurisdictions offshore fiscal responsibility will eventually be tied to the parent corporation so there's no 'shell corporation' shield. The only option to evade this would be for the parent to go bankrupt and place the asset distribution to creditors (which would include obligations toward unpaid pilots) before a bankruptcy court. I have no idea how this would work or if it even could work for an entity like CX.
So any involuntary furlough out of seniority would be a huge expensive quagmire. Doesn't mean they wouldn't try it with some scheme but in the long run IMHO they'll likely lose the case. Be interesting to see what they come up with.
The easiest way to avoid the mess is simply to furlough by seniority -- which is exactly what the contract says -- and/or have an attractive voluntary package of temp leave/retirement. Which is what US carriers (who have similar seniority based contract provisions) did. There's really not any way around seniority based furlough (if it comes to needing to furlough) that won't result in legal action (which given the specifics of the contract they're likely to lose anyway) and be costly for the company in any case. But I guess it'll give something for the newly furloughed guys to do. Guess we'll see one way or another.
There is no furlough provision in Hong Kong COS, traditionally furlough for airline pilots is an American thing where by you are simply no longer required and you don't work and you don't get any pay, if and when things pick up you get to come back to work if you so choose! This does not exist at Cathay, nor does it exist in Hong Kong, or the majority of the on-shored base locations, no idea what the CBa on the USA bases says.
In Hong Kong and the majority of our bases we have redundancy and the associated redundancy payment which is better than furlough as you don't get any severance payment on furlough with a US airline, so if and when we make cuts at Cathay they will be redundancies not furloughs, and they will come with the legally required payouts! This is why it's much better for the company to negotiate a reduction in wages and conditions (in the short term) than to start making employees redundant.