Originally Posted by
Spambhoy
Staff costs ( from last years returns ) were running at near enough 1B per annum.
Where's that figure from? Outgoings of ~£60m per month are more accurate, approx 80% of which is staff. I think total income last year was just shy of the £1b mark.
I have no idea how many staff NATS employ. I have no idea how many of those staff are ATCOs and how many are office types
It's about 5000 people in total. I believe about a third (happy to be corrected) of that are directly related to the operation, i.e. ATCOs/ATSAs/Engineers etc. With the rest being backroom/project staff.
This
Just remember that once an ATCO is gone, that's it. To get a new one, even from another unit will take at least 6 months to a year to replace. If it takes 3 to 4 years to get back to where we were, NATS would still need to recruit like crazy to replace the staff who leave on retirement, If they cut back the delays could impact aviation for many years.
and this
NATS have learnt nothing over the years about staffing. It has always irked the management that the staff they have in the summer are still there in the winter when the traffic is down by 50%. Everything is so short term in NATS and this knee jerk decision to give notice on the key agreement on redundancy is no different. Get out and borrow at a low rate and get all of the projects done that are usually constrained for 8 months of the year because of the operational staffing requirement.
are spot on.
If redundancies are to happen I would expect the majority to be the office staff. If you do the maths NATS can't afford to let many operational staff go. As has been mentioned there's an awful lot of retirements on the horizon (I think about a third of ATCOs are expecting to retire over the next ten years) and with a lead time of up to four years to recruit and train a fully qualified ATCO (never mind a couple more years of getting some experience under their belt) they're going to find themselves very short in a year or two once traffic is at 'normal' levels again. The CEO keeps banging on about how the size of the company will need to reflect the amount of flying going on. He seems to conveniently forget the fact we've been chronically understaffed for the past 5 years (overtime is the only thing that's stopped enormous delays over the summers) and are now probably at the correct level of staffing for what's expected to be normal traffic when all this is over. At the end of the day the funding model is flawed. The company can't grow and shrink at a moments notice to match current traffic as management types want it too. Of course none of us expect them to do the correct thing. We'll be picking up the pieces from the rash decisions currently being made for quite some time.