Originally Posted by
The Love Doctor
Therein explains why the AFAP is as good as useless. The "official" pilot union successfully negotiated a new base salary for highly trained individuals to be roughly min wage. Know your worth and just say no
This explains why pilots sit around and say things like “The AFAP is as good as useless” when they are not a paid up member but want all the benefits, and are completely unaware of the current award in place.
They will take a job for whatever money is offered “to get experience”, agree to a bond even though “they are illegal and non binding”, fly a better aircraft for the same money “I need the time to get out of here” and all this with no written signed employment contract or idea of the current Award.
Then when they get themselves caught up in a pickle, be it an incident, a workplace issue, trying to get out of a bond, medical condition etc, they ring the AFAP to get bailed out, only to find that they need to pay to join to receive representation and the process isn’t instantaneous.
Off they skip on the bond, increasing there prevalence and amount for all coming behind them, from there it is rinse and repeat until they get into an “airline”. They begrudgingly join a union “just for the loss of licence insurance” but continue to complain about them being “as good as useless” without ever getting involved in any of the good work the union does behind he scenes.
For the small number that do put in an enormous effort on behalf of the membership, they get ostracised as “management stooges looking to climb the greasy pole”.
But come EA time, our friends are once again the most vocal about all aspects of the process, but won’t “get involved with those useless bastards”.
These are generally the vocal “NO” voters, who are more than happy to take all the good things from the EA without ever acknowledging the hard work of the members that sacrificed their time to get the EA to the table.
So, maybe you could call up whichever one you think is the least “useless”, have a chat about your current situation, even join up if you can stomach it, you never know when you might need ”help”. This “help” comes in many forms, Industrial, Technical, Pilot Assistance programs and Loss of License insurance.
Or, google your local law firm and ask them for a quote to get IR legal advice to get you out of that pickle, I can guarantee it’ll be a lot more than 1.5% of your salary.