DrunkenAir
I am unable to pm you via PPrune - make yourself available for email's and and I will do so.
For those others interested - a short history:
A contract agreement was negotiated over many months by a group of Aussie pilots with AC through FY.
Without going through all the details the most important considerations as to why we all pulled the pin is as follows:
Payments were to be made after Chinese tax with an indexation component. These were removed.
The original agreement was for the payments to be made from AC only. It was changed to being divided between an AC payment plus a payment via FY.
For Australian tax purposes it was imperative that a document showing Chinese tax paid be supplied. If it wasn't, then the remuneration payment could incur Australian tax. We had no response from AC or FY on this and it was a main sticking point for our group.
Extensive discussions with the ATO were made to get their view. The result being that if the tax paid by AC could not be verified then more than likely Australian tax would be due, especially if the pilot was based in Australia.
Imagine after some years of working on this contract that the ATO comes knocking on your door with a 48% tax bill!! Its happened before.
The overtime was to be set at 80 hours each calendar month. It was changed to 240 hours in each three calendar months. Thus, if you worked hard on two of the months and soft on the third, you would not receive any overtime.
The original contract stipulated that full salary was to be paid from date of employment. Now not the case.
There were many more points, too many to post here, but all in all we as a group felt that we had negotiated in good faith. When at the death knell the contract was blatantly altered, it destroyed our trust in the people we were dealing with.
Be careful.