Dear Bamboozled Friends and Bamboo Management.
As mentioned in our first email, and now that we have almost everbodies email address, we will now include BAV management so they are aware of the actions that we intend to do if they insist in lowering our pay and making our work conditions worse.
It is important to make clear that these actions will NOT affect SAFETY or the company in any permanent way. For now on, BAV will have to communicate there actions towards us before applying changes and we will not just sit and allow ourselves to be screwed over and over again.
We have many ways to affect Bamboo image, and we will begin with social media and internet. This is will affect ticket sales and the recruitment of pilots that are eager to find a job, but do not know what they really are getting into. What stability and certainty will they have if BAV insists in unilaterally changing and not respecting any of there contracts? They will accept what conditions to only have them changed overnight?
The company is not being honest with the pilots that want to return to there jobs in Vietnam; we also want them back, we need them to come, but it is all at their own expense and risk of being cuarentined, without any kind of assurance that once they are here, the conditions are again changed and our salary reduced by another 30%! We know through vietnamese pilots that those are the plans of BAV management. And the Vietnamese pilots salaries were cut 30% without announcements and made retroactive to June 01! The Vietnamese pilots are NOT happy either!
We are also aware that the company is requesting the CAAV for us to fly 110 hours a month. So we will work more for less money?
BAV is hiring new pilots under local law, without brokers, but then the salary will be taxed between 20 to 30%! Again,
More work for less money!
With the intended new pay, many pilots will have to choose to pay the rent or to send their children to school. School in Vietnam is ridiculously expensive and again BAV does not offer any help or support. We cannot send our children to a state school because most speak no Vietnamese at all! Again this is unacceptable. Even the pilots that have there family in there home country will have to face this terrible choices, because they will have to maintain 2 houses, one here and one at home.
And for the new pilots that may think that BAV will promise quick upgrades, be advised that the company wants to charge you money for the upgrade! Several thousand dollars during this time of terrible economic uncertainty? Who is going to have the money for that?. Another chapter, coming back from Ho Chi Minh, a pilot told me the Visas are self funded at an outrageous sum paid to HR directly. The real cost of the visas are 60 US$ per pilot for 3 month multiple entry. The HR cost of those visas were 240 US$ per pilot. The excuse was, we need to pay to the "immigration officer". Thieves. All HR are involved in this.
If we do not receive honest assurances soon that there will be no more cuts and worse work conditions we will take further actions which include, but are not limited to, simply stop flying and ground all flights. We have the support of many Vietnamese pilots that are just as disappointed as the expats are.
We are available to HELP Bamboo, but NOT at the cost of our families, our safety, our fisical and mental health! The current conditions of the market does not mean that our help is to just sit and be screwed indefinitely, specially when many of these problems were from before COVID-19, like the 2 Airbus A330 that were painted and prepared, pilots were hired and paid while waiting then the dream A350 came into the offer only to be discarded at the very last moment forcing them to accept the A320 or get fired . That mistake was not free or without a huge cost, loss of Recency , Loss of Money .
BAV has to start improving there communication to us which is terrible. We are always in the dark without news about our lives, our roster, our income, etc., and we will not take this any more.
Fly safe,
The Bamboozled Pilots Initiative