Leezyjet your comments are welcome in this discussion however you have thoroughly misinterpreted the spirit of the topic. We are not "whingeing and moaning" about being crew - we are just asking for fair pay and pay increases for what we do.
have to buy your own food whilst at work
Yes well its somewhat difficult for us to do the same thing! Not too many cafes that I know of at 38,000ft...
not allowed to sleep whilst working an 18 hour day
Although I dont think your "18 hour"days (which I am sure are not rostered that way - if they are then something is seriously wrong) cross up to 9 time zones - and dont forget our days start at work generally 2 hours before flight departure, possibly then a 12 hour flight, a half hours worth of disembarking pax then security checks, followed by sometimes a hour wait in immigration before another hour on the bus to the hotel, and then of course the hotels that you have to wait for your rooms in (eg barbados - up to 3 hours sometimes) and so forth....
have a harder job to do generally (don't believe me - ask anyone who has done both crew and ground staff and they will always say working on the ground is much harder)
Ground staff definately get the short end of the stick with pax, and I will always always defend the fantastic role ground staff play in sorting out many disputes before they reach the a/c door, but you guys can always call the police if it gets out of hand - again, we cant! I have done a lot of ground crew helping back at my previous airline, and yes the work is very hard - but hard in a different way to what crew is.
Ever though of working overtime in the Clubhouse
Apparently (although I am happy to be corrected on this) overtime is no longer available for people who want to start out at the clubhouse - only available to those who have been previously doing it
The point here is that we are *not* complaining about our work as I mentioned earlier - there is a lot of responsibility that goes with being crew and anyone working on the ground has a lot of backup that we dont - you can call the fire brigade, the police, the paramedics, you can go home early if you get sick - these are all different perks to the perks that we get as crew. The debate here is not about who has the harder job or is more deserving of a payrise - I am sure the majority of frontliners in this company deserve one - the point is that we got offered an insult of a paydeal, have said no, and hope that we are able to negotiate something that is more realistic to the job we do, whilst being sustainable by the company!
(End Rant)