I have just written out a full page reply to Feathers which the computer has "eaten," so her is an abbreviated version:
Feathers,
I disagree with you. The company has a long history of streching/delaying paytalks out long enough so that they eventually co-incide with some form of crisis. This industry of ours historically has a crisis every few years and CX always takes full advantage of this.
The payrise that we have earned is long overdue and should come from the record results of the previous few years. It shouldn't be thrown out on the possibility of a period of harder times. Business is still extremely healthy. This will most likely continue for a long while yet as people still have to travel. I think the last weekly update had us about 10% ahead of budget.
Don't belive too much of the "Fuel crisis" propoganda that you are going to read about. Sure the price of fuel is very high but CX will come out of this much better placed than they would have been if there was no fuel crisis. Our opposition will/have suffer(ed) ultimately leaving CX with a larger market share and in the Oasis case, a partial soultion to the crewing problems.
Despite what the company say a fairly healthy chunk of the increased costs is eaten up by the passenger surchgarge along with the fuel hedging. How does this industry get away with this fuel surcharge?
It costs me 50% more to fill my cars gas tank today than it did a year ago but I have to pay for that. No fuel surcharges to help and no payrise either.
Every time we read that "currencies have worked in our favour" in the weekly news, what it really means is that the crew (HKG) have just gone even further backwards.
At the very least we need to have an agreement whereby we receive a minimum payrise of the inflation % each year. At least that way we are not going backwards as rapidly as we are now.