Buford
"I don't work for Emirates and have been reading all of the posts on this thread but don't really understand what all just happened here. Could someone working for EK describe exactly what just changed with the terms and conditions? I'm gathering that there's no more pay for deadheading but beyond that I'm having a hard time deciphering what's going on. "
To give you an analogy, suppose you work for GM on the car assembly line. Your job requires you to work 4 days/week building the cars (Mon-Thur) and 1 day/week doing paperwork in the office (Fri). Your normal work week is 40 hours; 32 hours building cars and 8 hours doing the paperwork. Your contract says that if you work over 40 hours/week (either building cars or doing the paperwork) they will pay you extra for your time. However, it will not be "overtime" that you might think of in the U.S. such as time and a half, double time, etc; it will be a small amount of "productivity pay" above your normal salary/hour you make anyway (if you made $20/hour GM decides to make your "productivity pay" $24.60 for each hour you work beyond 40 hours/week either on the assembly line or in the office. About 23% more than your base rate, and hence the reason the company has never used the term "overtime". In EK's structure that is approx the increase above your base rate for a 4 year Captain and as your salary increases over years in the company the % decreases (as the rate of "productivity pay" is a fixed amount that never changes). A year 12 Captain actually makes less per hour working "overtime" than his base rate/hour! No wonder the company had such a hard time finding "volunteers" to do "overtime".). Also lets say GM tells you that when they produce the monthly schedule they will roster you for this extra "productivity" at their discretion, that even if you have no interest in working "overtime" you just won't have any choice (EK currently) and it will just show up magically on your following month's roster.
Now suppose GM comes down and says they have decided to change the game. Now you will still work the 40 hours/week but they will only pay you overtime for the time you spend building cars on Mon-Thur. To compensate you for this they tell you they will lower the threshold for the productivity pay by 6% (83 to 78 hours in EK's case), so now your package at GM looks like this:
Productivity pay threshold: now 37.6 hours (6% less than before)
Mon-Thur: build cars for 32 hours
Fri: do paperwork for 8 hours
Because of the changes GM now can schedule you an additional 5.6 hours/week building cars before they need to pay you the additional "productivity pay". They can also now schedule you as many hours as they want on Fri doing paperwork as it does not come into the calculation for productivity pay and they do not have to pay you for it; in other words you get to work for free on Friday.
Now take all that and substitute car building for physically flying the airplane (block hours only) and substitute paperwork for reserve (standby duty), deadheading, simulators, ground school training, etc.
How do figure that would go down on the GM assembly line?
Still wanna come?????