AustHeli wasn’t Robinson Crusoe with the way they treated their pilots in Horn Island and from what I hear not much has changed with any of the companies that are still there. That includes Babcock. What I was talking about was a time when the pilots went the extra mile for the company with full confidence that they would be looked after by their managers and the company in return. That is how I remember it. Every company has its issues and AH wasn't perfect but everyone tried to make the company better because it made it a better place to work. Now it’s just a faceless international business whose focus is on engineering and defense, and not being the best helicopter company it can be.
helispotter I don’t think anyone who is serious about safety and good culture thinks that getting the chief pilot to negotiate against his pilots is a good idea. The last time Babcock tried this the chief pilot was sacked and the new EBA got up a couple of weeks later. I might be wrong but wasn’t there a CHC chief pilot in recent history that refused to get involved in the industrial side of things? Ours seems to be working very hard to help the company get around our industrial actions. There’s other senior managers who could be doing that instead of him. I think that a lot of people protested to head office that it was a bad idea at the time but it’s what I mean when I say Babcock isn’t an aviation company and the head office management don’t care about morale at the coalface or how it affects our work. If they did they wouldn’t be forcing the crewies to work against us either. Not the crewies fault. They’re caught between a rock and a hard place.
chopperdavo – No violins. Hang in there buddy and keep building your hours and qualifications. It's a long road but we all started somewhere. Fair pay in one part of the industry will help every pilot in the industry.
SLFMS you’re right. Lots of my colleagues feel the same but I guess some people just don’t ever want to make waves. Maybe they're they’re just scared. The new head honcho emailed everyone the other day with a typical management letter full of cliches and bull****. One of our pilots clicked on reply all and wrote a very sensible but prickly email back to him that explained why we don’t trust him or the company. It was brilliant. The MD has only been here since lunchtime and wants us to just forget about how the company has treated us. Typical corporate showbag, expensive, looks flash from the outside but really just full of **** and there'll be a new one next year.
We talk to our mates in other companies about how their EBA negotiations are going and everyone can look up the current EBA’s on the fairwork website. We know that pilots in other companies doing the same work are getting fair pay rises. People are already starting to apply for all the jobs going around the place and it’s not like there’s a bunch of unemployed 139 pilots with the right experience and qualifications to just replace them when they go. It's so short sighted.
The stink of this EBA negotiation is that Babcock say they can’t afford to give pilots a pay increase that stops our wages going backwards due to inflation because their costs have gone up but they still want to skim off the same amount of cream from the top. That isn't fair and certainly not a way to show that you value your employees. They don't value their employees! They should be embarrassed after we kept the company going during COVID. They have repeatedly told us that this is all about protecting profit margins for investors. They’re not even hiding it.
Profits for overseas investors instead of paying Australian pilots a fair wage
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