Nothing you can do and here is why.
The pilots do not think of the greater good for all pilots but only think of what will work for them at THIS time. I heard “I’ll never go on a base, so they can cut the salaries” and a couple of year later the wife says she is moving home. So if the based guys have something that suits them they will sign, and screw the others, same if the Hong Kong based pilots have something they will sign and screw the based pilots. It does not matter who screws whom. That is life of the pilots of Cathay Pacific. Pilots/New Joiners, Captains/First Officers/Second Officers are all the same. We at Management know this and we use it to our advantage. This is one trait of Cathay pilots that we adore and can exploit.
You will never get the pilots pulling in one direction. Too busy saying “I’m OK” and just plain fearful. Got to fancy this.
It seems many pilots don’t like the fallback position, so are going to vote yes on RP07. Those pilots know we will give them rosters that are so blundered; they wished they had signed RP07. We will make your life wretched in whatever way we can to teach you a lesson.
We see about 20 pilots posting on this forum that will be voting no, but ask around, you will receive a different response from pilots that don’t post or read Pprune. To them, RP07 is better then the fallback and they don’t get it forced on them, so it must be a good deal. In their mind they are better off. They beat the company by not having it forced on them, so are willing to take lower conditions.
Someone mentioned better travel scheme; dream on. Do you realize how much revenue we generate off our own staff? In the old days we had to get back our money we had stupidly given the pilots in the way of a travel fund. Ten years ago we stopped the travel fund and now we are basically taking money out of the pockets of the non-travel fund pilots. We charge a fuel surcharge to our staff, which is free money for Cathay Pacific. Don’t count on it changing.
We broke the union last year, we realized that the pilots of Cathay Pacific do not have the stomach for confrontation and will do anything to avoid it. The pilots know we will use our big stick to cut the heads off pilots that confront us or lead a confrontation. We have you living in fear. How many pilots do you see giving adverse comments on these deals in public? Even the so-called “hard core” pilots are keeping a low profile out of fear what we can and will do to them.
We have many pilots going above and beyond the call of duty because if they don’t, they know what we will do, even if the rules state different. We don’t receive adverse reports about the company anymore. As I said before, Fear is a great motivator. You don’t want to be the one sticking your head up.
We are confident the pilots will vote for RP07 because we know their character and it doesn’t change. As with any of these agreements, if they don’t pass, we will just implement them. I have heard one of the pilots put it “We are going to get the bat, it is up to us if we want it lubed or not”. We must stop slipping pilots in Bangkok.
We are now working behind the scene with the CAD to increase the duty times in Table A and B. This way we can have longer duty days to get in an extra sector and cut down on crew slipping at outports. Watch this space.
Voting by the AOA pilots is not even necessary; it is just to make you feel good. Either way, the agreements are going to be implemented, so you may as well vote yes and reduce your stress. We don’t want pilots getting so stressed and be absent from work again. I can assure you that will never happen at Cathay Pacific again.
As with the DEFO agreement, we will implement a new COS for new joiners, it’s not that hard.
The Management