bmi mainline strike issues
The main issue in bmi mainline is clear.
An agreement in late 2004 was accepted by bmi pilots and bmi management following a protracted series of negotiations, pilot meetings and ballots throughout that year.
This agreement covered three years - 2004, 2005 and 2006.
The most important part of it and the golden carrot to bmi mainline pilots was the 2006 element.
That said that a survey by independent consultants would look at bmi mainline pilot packages in their entirety and compare them with what other airlines were giving their pilots.
A very important part of that agreement was that data relating to BA and Virgin pilot packages would not be excluded from this exercise. Up to this time bmi management had always dismissed claims for any comparision of bmi mainline pilots terms to those of the main competitor airlines at LHR.
That survey took place in 2005 and negotiations were then meant to commence for the 2006 pay award based on the survey data.
bmi management then decided earlier this year to ditch the whole agreement and imposed the corporate pay award on the pilots and said that that was the end of it. No negotiations, survey binned , the end, we're not talking about it.
So basically the signatures of the bmi Personel Director and Flight Ops Director that appear on the agreement documents from 2004 are completely and utterly worthless.
All the negotiations in 2004 were a complete waste of time and we have been strung along by bmi management for the last two and a half years.
How they can expect us to to be taken in by their current promise of talking about 2007 to solve this defies belief.
How can we ever trust a written binding agreement signed by the same company directors again ?
As someone has already said, Midland management must have invented the term "Machiavellian" and for now this is what the "m" in bmi will always stand for with the present set of management.
None of us want to be in the position that we are in now - but bmi management through their own actions haven't left us with many choices.