"...some years ago I remember joint pay negotiations - 'X' - with a final offer tabled by management.Rejected by ATCOs branch,accepted by ATSAS/ATEs.We later accepted a revised offer (a better one of course) and were subjected to an awful lot of recrimination from the grades who prematurely (in my view) accepted the earlier offer...."
you missed a bit out at the point I have marked 'X' above. let me refresh your memory...
..with an agreement in place between the two Unions that, if one Union voted 'yes', but the other voted 'no', then it was back to the table for both Unions and their members. It was also mooted (but possibly not officially agreed) that the percentage pay rise offer should be the same for all - not X% for the ATCOs and a lesser Y% for the rest. As it turned out, PCS voted 'yes', Prospect voted 'no', so it should have been back to the table for both parties. But it didn't work out like that, did it? No - Prospect went back to the table on their own
and without recourse to PCS, who once they found out about Prospect's sleight of hand, promptly rejected the accepted offer as per the 2-Union agreement...
so much for Unions working together in agreement
that is where the recrimination stems from!
Gapster, thank you for your 'sympathy' for the lower ranks. I shall put your 'lapse of memory' down to having done 20+ years within NATS, (which is sufficient to addle anybody's brains), and which you must have done if you were once an ATCA.
As for it being 'a little rich to be subject to the view that I would not stand up for the ATSA grade', neither Prospect nor its membership have officially stood up for us before or since - and even though we all hear the ATCO blah about how 'invaluable' and 'essential' we are, I shall not be expecting the majority of them to change their ways in the future, and certainly not whilst the 2-Union arrangement exists.