Well the Pilots EBA is out, and at best its apparently useful as toilet paper and thats about it. The scary thing is ours is likely to be worse than theirs as their union is stronger than ours when it comes to negotiations
Two interesting things particularly that have come up in their EBA: Firstly, paxing sectors are not included in your rostered maximum duty hours. So, for example, as according to this table (straight from CAP371)
they could operate a 2 sector duty signing on at 0800 that could go up to 13 1/4 hours, eg BNE-PER, sit around in PER for a few hours before operating PER-BNE - and then because paxing is apparently NOT included in the Duty Times allowed on that table, be able to then pax to anywhere in the network
(this is from what the Pilots have told me by the way, I have not been able to read their full EBA proposal as yet)
Secondly, the table above is whats called Flight Duty Period, and FDP was defined to us in the Cabin Crew forums as being Sign on to Chocks On at your final destination - ie it excludes your 1/2 hour sign off time - so really, you need to add half an hour onto the duty times listed above.
I cant see our duty periods being terribly different to theirs...
It will be important that when this document does come out, people make informed and
self-educated decisions, rather than believing everythign we get told in the forums.
I had an interesting interaction with a MEL based Cabin Supervisor today who basically went mental at me when I told her that so far it appears most of BNE will not sign for it. From what she was saying (in between the ranting, yelling and raving
) was that most of MEL seem to like it
, but there was no fact in what she was telling me - it was all emotional diatrabe...
The key here is for people to educate themselves independently - dont listen to what the company has to say (does anyone else wonder how much this glossy advertising campaign thats in the crew room cost them? And this dvd thats apparently coming out? Would that money not be better being put into our salaries?), dont listen to what the crew have to say - only believe whats written in black and white (because the worst case scenario is what we will be able to be rostered up to) so when the time comes you can make
your own educated decision.