Well said bigmac and Sir Scruggs. Roderick Eddington is right now grinning about the 165,000 share options (at £3.21 per share) that the rest of the board voted him last week!
I would like to say that Ms A Jameson deserves a B+ for her article. As far as journos writing about pilot's pay is concerned, she did a pretty good job.
The situation at BA is quite simple. Despite what the BA spokeswoman says, we are having a hard time recruiting experienced pilots and now, even retaining pilots.
Most of us who fly for BA have shares in the airline and we are very keen for the compay to do well. During the Gulf war we took a 5% pay cut to help out the company and we have done our best to restructure and implement the Business Efficiency Program. We have seen our productivity and hours flown increase yet our P60s and days off decrease. At our last pay deal we were sold out by Balpa (1.?% increase), who were still trying to work in partnership with BA, yet BA managed to find the money to give CSDs a 5.6% pay rise. We are now being subjected to more and more disciplinaries and our sickness is even being closely monitored to make sure that we work as close to 900 hours per year as possible.
Flight Ops can find the money to offer starting pay of £85,000 to IT managers and give them date of birth (rather than date of joining) seniority for Staff Travel, yet a 20 year BA Captain is on a salary of £76,854pa (not £110K) and is responsible for 100s of lives, $220,000,000 worth of company assets (a 747-400) and $1 billion of liability.
Rod Eddington is 100% correct when he complains that BA is suffering from a silo mentality. Each department is only concerned about its own costs and not the overall cost to the airline. As a result of paying managers bonuses for handling their own budget, the big picture has been lost.
Many of us feel that enough is enough. We no longer feel charitable for the greater good. Why should we work harder for less only to see the savings thrown away by other departments? At least the City sees our value and importance: "Pilots have a lot of power. They can stop an airline overnight and they can wipe out a year's profits in weeks...".
When you look at BA's turnover, it is amazing that our profits are so poor. Yet many of BA's pilots now earn less than pilots at Ryanair and Easy. Much of BA's core work has been contracted out, yet our employee numbers keep growing.
At Waterside (company HQ) people show up for work at 10.30am and then head home at 2.30pm. By 4pm the place is deserted. Go and see it for yourselves if you don't believe me! Sadly BA's modern management practices are such that if you only require 4-5 hours to do your work then fair enough. Well I say put in a full 8 hour day and lets reduce the number of time wasters and leeches who are bleeding this company dry.
Yes, sadly there is a storm on BA's horizon. And it is of their own doing. BA's pilots are a dedicated and hard working group but we have had enough of being taken advantage of. An extra 10% would only go about 1/3 of the way towards getting us back on side.