6.3% payrise
How many ATCOs are really satisfied with this pay rise? The CSB determines how much we deserve to get by using something called pay trend indicator which compares our salary with the private sektor counterparts. Ok, then who's our counterparts? Lawyers? Doctors? Real Estate agents? We're in a unique profession which doesn't exist in private sektors (at least in hkg).
The closest match maybe the pilots, so how are we going to compare our job with flying the big iron? The airplane is a piece of sophisicated equipment that requires someone with a lot of experience to handle, and that "someone" is responsible for the few hundred souls on board, staying at the outports away from the family and more importantly, could kill him/herself when making a mistake. Then what about us controllers? Yes, our radar is no where near the sophisication of an aircraft, and we can go home every day, and under most circumstances, won't get ourselves killed (except the Ueberlingen incident), but we are responsible for much much more lives in the skies, we could handle in excess of 150 planes in a whole shift, i.e. 150x of the responsibility. No one can really draw a fair conclusion after this sort of comparison, but we definitely deserve much more than this mere 6.3% increase. After these years of pay cuts and rises, if my calculation is correct, it's only a net increase of 5% from 1997, and how much more traffic we have handled since that time?! AA should give us a profit share, we're the ones who do the hard work after all.