olderairhead,
You are still claiming that, if called to do duty on a "day off", you don't receive an RDO payment and cannot decline the request to work.
You said:
If you agree to work on a Designated day off you get a penalty payment. Under the new agreement, if you work on a day off (day free of duty) you don't.
I still cannot see how you can hold this view. I did ask you to "spell it out" to me, but you have not done this. So, I will have to try to guess my way there.
From the above quote, it seems you think "designated day off" is a different animal to "day off", and that if on the latter, you can't claim the RDO payment if called onto duty. If this is what you think, please explain what a "day off" is, and how you can come to be on one.
If the day in question has an "O" shown on the roster against your name, then the day is clearly a "designated day off" and as the two clauses I quoted in my previous post clearly show, you can decline the request to come on duty, but if you do come on, you can claim the RDO payment, irrespective of which base you are at (Schedule C 1.8.9 & clause 3.18).
So if there is not an "O" on the roster, what could there be? If you answer "R" (for reserve) or some other letter that denotes duty, then I have to guess you are talking about what it says in Schedule C 1.8.11.
Schedule C 1.8.11:
If a pilot on a tour away from home base is not required for duty on any rostered duty day, such a day shall be considered a day free of duty for rostering purposes but not a designated day off at home base.
The words "home base" at the end of this clause are redundant and are perhaps what is causing the confusion - you can ignore those two words because they don't have any effect - the two clauses I quoted earlier prevent these words having any effect.
What this clause is saying, in effect, is that if on a day
other than "O", if you don't do any duty then the day may be considered a "day off" for the purposes of flight and duty time limits and subsequent rostering, but if you
do do some duty, you can't claim the RDO payment!
And this makes perfect, logical sense. Clause 10.1.11 of the current agreement appears to say the same thing, but not as clearly.
Regarding the meal allowance "changes": You appear to know much more about this than I. To save me several hours researching this, could you please give a rundown on the pros and cons of them being linked to the RBA (e.g. what the RBA is all about, how much the allowances currently are, how much they will change when the linkage to the RBA occurs, and then how much they might change by over subsequent years).
Seaeagle109,
I understand now what you are saying about the loss of licence insurance. I became aware of the issue with this only upon reading the AFAP white paper recently. Even then, I couldn't understand what they were on about (because their explanation was too short and too hurried). I understand now and thank you for your explanation.
The way it was presented in the AFAP paper was as an "unnegotiated change" that was detrimental to pilots. My assessment of that change as being an "improvement for pilots" was made purely on the basis that the company's contribution had increased.
About the grey days, as they apply to calibration pilots:
The definition of grey day (clause 3.29 in the proposed CA), states that you have to be
rostered to a grey day. Given that under the current agreement, rosters must cover a 28 day period and be issued at least 7 days prior to the commencement of the roster period, are you actually being rostered onto grey days?
I ask this because I expect that, given how calibration flights need to fit in with ATC, traffic flows and other variables, there is no way you could stick to a roster that was prepared 7 days earlier.
So, when you say "grey day" are you in fact referring to the period that comes after a duty period and associated rest but before the commencement of the next duty period? If you are, but don't have a roster saying "grey" for that day, then I don't see how you can consider that period to be "grey day".
The issues concerning being contacted by the client sound more to do with ordinary management issues than the definition of "grey days". Or am I missing something?
Given how different calibration work must be to the other PAA flying, I wonder why on earth we are trying to have the one CA that covers all the different roles/duties. I would have thought that it would have been far more simple to have different CAs for each of the different contracts, with clearly defined conditions for when a pilot temporarily transfers from one contract to another.
In practice, the different CAs would still have 90% commonality, and that common portion would be in a separate document. Then, you guys wouldn't have issues over things such as "grey days" which I think are really only about the NTAMS contract.