alfie 1999
Do recent accounts support this?
Yes. Look carefully and you'll see that NATS is trading profitably but it's real assets excluding goodwill and the pension fund are at best the same as its liabilities. It doesn't have much in the way of reserves and it's potential to borrow is limited because it's already heavily borrowed against its assets. It is much more robust than it was in 2001 and with prudent management can survive most expected events but not a big trauma.
Did NATS shed staff post-01? Or during previous downturns?
Yes it did. The composite solution under which NATS was rescued from administration required £170 million of savings made up of the pension holiday, postponed ATCO recruitment and support cost savings. A lot of people's jobs were hidden in that phrase support cost savings. They were all voluntary redundancies and most were jumping to avoid having to resign when we moved out of London but they were still real people who lost real jobs even if some people prefer to refer to them as dross.
So employees are 'ignorant' for not supporting the managements proposals?
It's got nothing to do with opposing or supporting the management's proposals. I was referring to an ignorance of risk management even though so much of what we do in NATS is based upon it. Those familiar with risk management will recognise that sometimes the bad thing is so bad that you have to do something about it even if it isn't very likely. This may be one of those times.
So we should offer up our T&Cs to mitigate a 'great potential hazard with a likelihood that is very low'.
See my previous response. If I could lose my pension and the chance of that happening was less than impossible then I might be prepared to offer up some T&Cs to make it less likely, especially if in practice what I was offering up was next to nothing. As I've said before how close to nothing this particular T&C is depends upon how optimistic you are about future payrises.
You may want to take a look at my post about the effect of just a one year pay freeze compounded over the 15 year MOU.
You probably didn't realise it when you made that post but you've illustrated exactly why the company wants to implement the RPI+0.5% cap. Over pension timescales a small increase can have an enormous effect on the liability.
Do you really believe the government would ever allow a strike to go ahead - affecting millions of voters 2 weeks in the med - for the sake of the relatively tiny sums involved?
I have no idea as that would be a political decision and there is never any logic in political decisions. However from time to time every Prime Minister prays for a small war to distract the electorate and allow them to demonstrate strong leadership and an ATC strike might just be Gordon's small war. If the Government believes that people with expensive cars, large mortgages and school fees to pay can't afford to strike they might be willing to call your bluff.