Better having a target pay Budget where everyone buys in with a pay reduction till the industry picks up.
The buy in is the new part time option- 87.5%. A number of people will happily sacrifice this in order to both save jobs, and have a life outside of work. What people will not do is stomach both a pay cut and part time. I hope BALPA are sensible and understand this, else the new part time options will become a moot point.
Just to put the other side of the LIFO argument, I’ve never quite understood how it would be fair (to use a BA example) why I as a A320 FO should be forced out of the business to make way for a 747 FO who quite clearly in normal times wouldn’t dream of taking up a SH role, who would incur a retraining cost as well as having to pay (stat redundancy) for me to exit. LIFO within a fleet, absolutely, but as soon as you have to start shunting people into training courses, it becomes a lot harder to justify in my opinion (and is borderline illegal anyway - see redundancy bumping).
I do not personally believe BA will use anything other than LIFO+. They can surely sense the destruction it would create long term if they were to go against this agreement. Rightly, or wrongly, it is an agreement we all signed upto on the day we joined. However, I do think there is potential legal recourse in being made redundant, to then have someone else ‘retrained’ to carry out ‘your’ job. Is the job title of ‘pilot’ enough to cover any challenge?
In addition, there are also rumblings of the fact that the CC chairman would be directly in the firing line if BA was to make cuts by fleets. Whether this is having any bearing on proceedings I can only hazard a guess, but it would certainly change most people attitudes if they were negotiating away their own job 🤔
No matter what happens, all that I can hope is that whatever is presented will allow for any pilots made CR to have an automatic RTR.