Yesterday there was another, very balanced article in the Irish Times devoted to this matter which is far too long to reprint and there is no point adding a link as an account is required to read it (and since a lot of you people are up in arms over having to pay for a coffee then I suspect a subscription to the said news paper would be out of the question!).
It boils down effectively to FR’s utter fear of what an organised union could do to it business, and it has an abundance of recent history to fall back on to support its fears. Unions are very prone to been taken over by megalomaniacs with hidden agendas geared ultimately towards their own self interest - (the name Willy from air fungus mean anything to you and didn’t he do well for himself ). Anyone who tries to tell me that union leadership is made up of a bunch of altruistic fellows with exclusively the interests of its members at heart are kidding themselves. Their ‘raison de etre’ is to squeeze the best deal possible without regard to the long term well being of the business and leaqst anyone forget, FR is a business. Where were the senior pilots when the Ryan family had to mortgage everything it owned to keep the business flying – busily feathering their own nest, that’s where. The union needs to demonstrate to the management that it has the long term best interests of the company at heart and not just the pilots. But no, the senior pilots, and its always the senior pilots cause there all right jack and screw the rest, think they have a God given right to fly and by the way, we also make the rules. Well maybe they have, but not with FR – try the hoity toity, jolly hockey sticks handle bar moustached brigade of BA et al if thats what your after. This group, though they cant see it, have helped create an environment that MOL can now exploit to his advantage every single time that this issue comes up. It’s a basic concept of the free market and its called supply and demand. The senior pilots throughout this industry have helped create the environment where hundreds of Wannabees have to, and are prepared to, pay for their own training and put themselves on the market for the highest, or in FR’s case, the lowest bidder. The senior pilots over the years allowed this to happen cause they turned the industry into a closed shop and made it so difficult for people to get in that the inevitable happened – JAR. While they were busy running out of height adjustment in their cockpit caused by the ever increasing thickness of the fat wallets they were sitting on, armies of guys an gals were forking out upwards of 80K of their own dosh to put themselves through training and coming out the other side more than competent to fly an aircraft. So the prospect of having to pay for a Type is second nature. Now they are hungry to work and MOL must think its Christmas every day and you guys helped create it.
By the way, just in case some of you think you can comfort yourselves in the knowledge that I'm a screeming MOL fan well I'm not. (The same thing is going on in many other LCC's but they dont have an excentric media hogging self publisist as a CEO). I am however a fan of what he has created and achieved.