Originally Posted by
Climb150
Sunfish,
Evething you say is true but Virgin employees and suppliers couldn't give two hoots who takes over the company. As long as they are taking home a paycheck every week because that is their primary concern.
Contracts, ownership structures etc are about 187th on the list of worries for Virgin employees right now.
Nobody cares what will happen in 2 years.
I too am someone who cares what happens in 2 years time. As a pilot - I want an entire career with Virgin, so it’s vitally important to me that this place is around in 2/5/20 years time.
What’s going to be important about who takes over is what the plan for staff numbers as well as terms and conditions are. I am concerned about what I read about Bain - and I feel Sunfish is spot on about what he wrote above.
There is a good article in the AFR today also saying that there is the real possibility of 1000s of jobs that could be lost. The CEO is starting to change his tune on this front, recently saying that not everyone will be here at the end of this process. The issue is that there is a lot of ‘head in the sand’ by employees at the moment - no one is really too concerned about their jobs, when they absolutely should be.
There is a lot of posturing going on by the ACTU and TWU. It’s all good and well to want as many full time jobs as possible on current Ts and Cs - but at what cost? It’s disingenuous for these unions to not be addressing the elephant in the room. There will be job losses - so what are these unions going to do about it? From a pilots perspective, I hope my unions goal is to keep as many pilots as possible - giving people the option of Part Time, and perhaps even the unpopular idea of a reduction in pay to keep everyone employed.
If an airline pilot is made redundant at the moment, the likelihood of them continuing in a career in aviation is significantly reduced. Many of my colleagues have young families, new homes, etc etc, so if I have to take a bit of a hit to ensure these people aren’t out on the street, then so be it.