Merry Christmas?
An early Christmas present for 500 lads and lasses at Southampton; the current NATS boss of barely six months came to us from ALSTOM as you know, together with several of his henchmen to fill non-advertised posts. In their wake is a trail of destruction of company-wide proportion.
The new NATS HQ at Whitely was strategically placed between Swanwick and Southampton.....did I say strategically or co-incidentally?....can't remember......anyway with hindsight it was not necessary because the "500" refers to the number of brother workers thrown on the scrapheap a week before Christmas with the closure of the ALSTOM Rail engineering base at Eastleigh.
This week it is "aviation" and your jobs are safe because ATCO's are in short supply.......but think ahead brothers and sisters......the British Government does not have the same bale-out policy as our French cousins, who rescued ALSTOM to the tune of several £billion.
Down at Swanwick we just work and work, and absolutely nothing else....every common-sense recommendation for liaison visits and Fam flights is completely ignored.....we are just blobs on a staff graph on some-one's wall.
Welcome to NATS West Country buddies.