Like I said I’m not going into bat for the company. I think the pilots should use the appropriate channels to make sure the company is held to the EBA. A bunch of people saying, “Oh look what they did to those guys, dodging my bond will teach them” doesn’t fix a thing. Like I said, I’m not there anymore, but everyone I know who tried to side step the bond were provided with accom etc as per the EBA during their training. Where do you draw the line? Should the guys who got temporary placements in Sydney take sickies to make up the financial loss? How does that help future employees? If it was such a huge sticking point they shouldn't have accepted the offer in the first place. (Just to clear things up as well, you are only entitled to accom if you are not based there, so if these people ended up staying on in sydney they were never entitled to it in the first place. Again this happened around when I was leaving so din't know the full story)
Surely, we should strive for both parties to be acting in accordance to what they agreed to by using a united front. Tit for tat solves nothing. Reading some of the posts here, I honestly believe that often pilots are their own worst enemy.
Regardless of all of the above, bonds, wages, basings etc., are all disclosed before you are required to sign your letter of employment. If any of that is a surprise then you either didn’t read the contract or didn’t ask enough questions. In my entire time at Rex, my terms and conditions were exactly as advertised as per the contract I was sent with my offer of employment. I read it until I knew it backwards and even carried it in my nav bag after I was employed. If you don’t want to be bound by the bond, have the balls to tell them that in the interview.
As for Qlink, I wouldn’t have a clue what their current arrangement is. I stopped caring when I got into Rex. All I know for sure is that when I was doing ground school we often used to bump into Eastern guys down on Botany Rd in the evenings. We had – a wage (albeit a training wage) going into our account from day one, a hotel room, lunch provided every day, flights to and from our interstate bases every weekend, all without a single dollar of our own handed over. The Qlink guys were paying for their own accom, their endorsements, and weren’t even guaranteed a job at the end of it. So when you are saying look what happened, I would say I saw a heap of pilots who where prepared to accept the offer on the table.