Ex KA captains being offered JFO position

[Stone Temple Pilot]

swh

I respect your kind words, and likewise - my greatest respect to CX pilots.
However, I don't believe I have ever suggested a KA employee to be a CX employee.
Instead, a KA employee was a Cathay employee, in the sense that we had the same wonderful "hub", safety department, personel, aircrew management, crew room etc - as has been suggested in my previous posts.
We were told we were part of the team.....except when we weren't.

Originally Posted by swh

The best analogy I can give you is IAG group (Air Lingus, British Airways, Iberia, Level, and Vueling), IAG closed down OpenSkies their airline based out of Paris last year due COVID. BA also made many pilots redundant due COVID. The argument you are putting forward is like saying the pilots that were out of job when Openskies closed down that have the right to work in the UK should be employed by BA because they were part of the IAG group. Not only should they be employed by BA, they should be employed before the pilots BA made redundant were rehired because they are older

Not a good analogy, I'm afraid.
I've been working myself in a few other airline groups previously.
Albeit with proper jurisdiction for employees and company mergers - AND with unions with enough foresight to have scape clauses and common seniority lists across the group.
So I know the differences and similarities.

Back to your analogy: OpenSkies was taken over by Level. "On 28 November 2017, IAG announced that its low-cost airline brand Level would launch flights in July 2018 from Paris Orly Airport, which would be operated by staff that were currently employed by OpenSkies and using the airline's air operator's certificate. In preparation for the change, OpenSkies' IATA code was changed from EC to LV in May 2018. The OpenSkies brand ceased to operate on 2 September 2018, after which all its staff began to operate Level flights."

FlightGlobal stated that the retirement of the last OpenSkies branded aircraft "marked the end of the OpenSkies brand, from a public-facing perspective." OpenSkies began operating as Level France, with the same employees since operating under a new brand, with flight crew retrained to fly Airbus aircraft."

(My emphasis in bold)

So following your analogy, with CX taking over the KA aircraft and routes, the KA staff should have been taken on to continue the flights on the CX AOC and Cathay Pacific brand if we were to follow precedence in (European) history and your analogy.
Of course, I have to say, Europe has proper employment laws governing such scenarios of company take-overs. Hong Kong has, well, Swire, CAD and the government. Enough said.

Ok, so OpenSkies formally operated under Level, which actually entered insolvency during COVID.
Again, a very different scenario to KA/CX. Cathay Dragon was never even close to being insolvent. Quite the contrary.
The analogy stops there once more.

Hypothetically, yes ok, let's say OpenSkies, not being integrated with Level, but shut down and taken over by BA - all routes and aircraft transferred within the IAG group to BA.
Would you not think that Europe had proper laws in place, in order to let the OpenSkies crew operate these aircraft ahead of new-joining BA crew as it is a company take-over?

If the routes, the operation, the aircraft of OpenSkies/Level (whatever you call it this week) would be completely gone as a result of COVID and insolvency, yes, fair enough - a parent company could take over and start up an operation under their own brand at a much later time.
But CX is currently swinging (ex-KA repainted?) 330s and soon A321NEOs left, right and center to beautiful places such as WUH, XMN and CTU and has been doing it for a while along with BLR, CCU, KHH, HAN and KTM.
Similarly, if IAG decided to call it quits on OpenSkies, take their aircraft and continue the operation out of ORY to JFK/EWR as BA, I'm pretty sure that the crew would follow the aircraft under these circumstances.
I am not talking about an OpenSkies operation going wrong, their airframes being sold and their crew then demanding a LHR base on the BA seniority list on a completely different operation on completely different aircraft and completely different routes - that would be wrong (unless of course there was a joint seniority clause in place...but alas, seniority was signed away from in Hong Kong anyway).