Originally Posted by
sayitasitis
That’s the point that’s being made though.. you shouldn’t have had to seek other employment just to get by. The salary should be enough but the majority need to make huge sacrifices. Many take a salary cut and knowing that they can be posted anywhere, like yourself, end up with double accommodation payments. NATS know this fine well but still pay the minimum they can get away with.
Now if the timescales quoted during recruitment were accurate then that’s not so bad but we were seeing more and more trainees needing hold for months between basic + acs or adi + aps. This is through no fault of their own but throws any budget calculations right up in the air. You can only hope that NATS will take a more logical approach with training post covid rather than just cram in as many courses as possible.
Granted the salary is just for training but it’s training to become an ATCO, not a burger builder at McDonalds. Admittedly covid has muddied the waters a bit financially but this has been an issue long before that. It wasn’t long ago the salary was 12k and it’s not like the company could plead poverty.
Let’s use 140 TATCs as an example given we know that’s roughly how many there were when the pandemic hit. To double their salary would cost the company in the region of £2.4million. Then there’s pension and NI contributions too so say £3mil per year. In the 18/19 and 19/20 financial years the company paid out a total of £118million in dividends to shareholders.
Trying to justify a poor training salary as being acceptable just because the alternative is worse doesn’t float either. Attempted murder isn’t acceptable just because the alternative could have been murder.
You’re right, not many will have regretted it but I’m sure many will have had doubts mid way though when the purse strings need to tighten. I’m even more sure that a huge number of potentially top class controllers will have decided against applying purely because of the salary which given the amount of talent NATS is going to lose in the next few years is really quite disappointing.
Very well explained: just to add, if Covid taught us anything, it's that the promise of a job at the end of training is not what it seems. In the good times, yes, but there's no guarantees, whatever the contract says.