Originally Posted by
BudgieFerguson
I’ve had enough.
Australian multi-engine helicopter pilots, do not come to Babcock even though there will be plenty of vacancies here soon as people start walking out the door.
There’s loads of jobs around at the moment and Babcock has gone from being the best place to work in Australia (when we were Australian Helicopters) to the worst.
We’ve had 4 managing directors in about three years and the latest one is as arrogant and out of touch as the one he replaced. There's another thread on here where people have commented on the qualities of the new guy. Where do we find them? How does the CEO keep stuffing this up?
After the pilots kept the show on the road during COVID by fillingl countless shifts at short notice the company rewards us by threatening us for not toeing the line and refusing to accept a terrible pay deal.
The new MD has written to us and said that if we don’t accept their latest insulting pay offer, they won’t pay us any back pay (because the EBA expired over six months ago) or they’ll throw out the in-principal agreements that our team have already spent a year negotiating.
They screwed the aircrew with their EBA for three years and now they’re trying to do the same to pilots and the engineers.
They’ve done nothing but drag their heels and stuff around the pilots (and the engineers with their agreement) for a year. They've already tried tried to get us to accept an offer that would have seen us frozen on the seniority ladder for four years and then asked us to work 60 hours of overtime for free every year before we’d ‘qualify’ for overtime payments.
Industrial action was only reluctantly taken after Babcock refused to discuss salary for six months and then came out with that insulting offer.
Thank you AFAP and our EBA team. You've done a fantastic job but the company have sunk to new lows to get their way.
They’ve now become experts at divide and conquer tactics. They started by getting the Chief Pilot to negotiate against his own pilots. How can we trust him to look out for our best interests in anything when he's trying to get us to accept a **** pay offer. He’s a good bloke that doesn’t seem to realise how the company have used him.
Now they’ve ordered the crewies to do the jobs that we were targeting in the industrial action. That’ll really make things comfortable in the crew room and the cockpit won’t it. Crewies being forced to do the jobs they aren’t paid to do and undermine the pilot sitting in the seat alongside of him. The manager who ordered this should hang their heads in shame. So should the very small minority who seem to relish being company minions. You’re embarrassing yourselves and your colleagues. You know who you are. Have some self respect.
When our competitors are offering annual pay increases of over 4.5% each for working on similar contracts why would you stay here or want to come here?
This is what happens when big multi-nationals buy good companies. They take hardworking and successful operators, put a fat, bloated headquarters over the top that sucks up 80 grand each time the appoint another HR lackey or IT nerd, and drain any goodwill of their hardworking operational employees that make them the money. They’ve cut all of the important departments like training and safety to the bone. There are not enough people to run the place properly any more. Do more with less. At some point it’ll break.
Babcock are not an aviation company. They ride the defence gravy train. Profit at all costs - even at the expense of the people that make you the money for your overseas shareholders.
It’ll be hard to make a profit when all your experience walks out the door and there’s not enough pilots or engineers left to do the job. Australian Helicopters was a great company. It's a crying shame to see what it's become.
You just have to look at the long list of MEIR jobs that keep getting advertised . They want more and more for nothing.