Justnightstopping, MAD base is still fairly small compared to the UK bases. You do have good managers there (I personally think that 'CG' is a lovely lady and I always enjoyed chatting with her when she was based at LGW).
You might be working an average of just 8.5 days per month - myself, I am working on average 20 days per month. Most working weeks I average about 57 duty hours and am absolutely shattered. I sleep through most of rest day 1, sleep well into rest day 2 and then only feel human again on rest day 3.
Yet again this month, rostering took my 900 hours total to 880 hours. Crewing have since added more duties to my roster taking me to almost 890 hours. I still have SBY duties on my roster for this month, even with a total block hours in excess of 100!
The company makes out that safety is our number one priority - except it isn't. Getting a bum on a crew seat is all they care about. You will hear the response "It's legal!" more and more over the next few months when crewing call out crew to fly when they are fit to drop.
Some bases are well run, others are not. Some bases only care about anciliary revenue and the SPH - others realise there is more to the job than selling. The only time you ever seem to hear from the ACCM's at LGW is when they are once again posturising over how wonderful a base LGW is and that we must do better with our sales, or threatening crew with performance related issues. We have a monthly base newsletter at LGW, it might as well be called the "LGW Sales Newsletter" for the content contained in it. It never fills you in on what management are doing to resolve local issues (Catering, cleaning, care-bears) which are things crew would like to know about. Management seem to poo-poo you with excuses when you have problems (I have first hand experience of an extremely ineffective LGW manager who loves to talk the talk yet never walks the walk).
So what with:
- 7 days on, 1 day off going to be a regular occurence
- Management only caring about sell SELL SELL SELL.
- Crew going from the A319 fleet to the A320/21 subfleet and being shafted financially
- Restrictions on how many days annual leave you can have in the summer period
It really is no wonder people are pi$$ed off.
I salute your local management in MAD, perhaps they should teach the rest of the network and H89 how to really run the company.
Incidentally, you don't need an MBA to run a company. I personally think there are far too many graduates in positions of power who don't have a clue how to actually do things in the real world. What is needed is people from the bottom to be promoted up into positions of responsibility, where they can inform senior management of how things should be handled in the real world - but that would be far too sensible a decision......