Safety Concerns - More than a little harsh....read up on my background, why don't you, instead of jumping to, frankly, baseless and uneducated guesswork ...in fact I'll save you the effort...
I'm recently graduated from flight school (Dec 08) having spent 14 years since graduating from uni in management positions for some of the largest companies in the world. I worked fffff....lipping hard to earn enough to pay for my training outright. I have no debt, but at the same time due to some seriously bad timing on my part, neither do I have a flying job - hence I'm back in management, in my old job earning more than most captains do. I am NOT some wannabe management monkey that THINKS they know about management...it is how I [currently - and against my wishes] make my living and have done for years. Neither am I affiliated to any particular airline, union or other grouping. My concerns for the "bottom of the pyramid" comes from the fact that this is where I am.
I DID apply to Ryanair, I DID get an interview and I ffffff...lipped it up spectacularly. You won't find me bitching that they didn't offer me a position - they were absolutely right not to, based solely on my performance that day. Likewise, neither - right now - will you find me wailing and gnashing my teeth about it. The recruitment at RYR has - in my opinion- taken a dangerous [in context of the prospects of those about to spend £30k + getting a TR with them] twist and I'm actually bloody glad I'm not having to face that decision now.
I have no love for Ryanair whatsoever. I do think MO'L is a very shrewd - if deeply unethical - operator. I also think he's missing a very large trick in that if you continually stretch anything, eventually it snaps. Treating your staff like crap is a very, very odd thing to my mind and I'm pretty sure at some point he will get bitten back hugely and that it will cost him dearly.
However, if you are really so myopic that you believe that Ts and Cs should spiral ever upward regardless of the economic environment, then you old friend are living in cloud fecking cuckoo land. If you believe that anyone that disagrees with your blinkered opinion is a "management stooge" for RYR, then god help us all. God forbid a balanced and unbiased viewpoint - for it may actually allow progress and we wouldn't want that, would we?
BUSINESSES - which, much as we may not like to admit it, is what airlines are - need to do whatever it takes to survive.
Opinion like that you apparently have (that anyone suggesting sometimes things have to go down before they can go up) is what makes unions dangerous. It is WHY managers like O'Leary are so loathe to sit down and talk to them....because you are clearly - or at least "apparently" given your reflux at my previous post - incapable of seeing that negotiating in a downturn may require different objectives - and with kid gloves to boot - than negotiation in an upturn.
So, for the avoidance of any doubt - what I was trying to illustrate is not that people should take a pay cut just because it is a downturn, but that you should consider the oft mentioned example of Thomson.... sometimes people have to take a small degradation in Ts and Cs to preserve something else - i.e. the jobs of others in your org, the org itself. The Thomson pilots are to be applauded for recognising this. Businesses should NOT continue to offer an unsustainable product by simply reducing the terms of it's employees, but by the same token, unions should not seek to force a less competitive situation, when businesses are failing anyway.
One of the difficulties I'm trying to point out is that unions OFTEN fail to recognise this - Bob Crowe being a prime example....he would have battered Thomson with threats of industrial action into giving them all a payrise, five days more a year off AND keeping them all on....as a result, we quite possibly would have seen the business go to the wall. How does that benefit anyone? It doesn't, but apparently you would see this as a good thing.
Further, for the avoidance of any doubt - if pay cuts -or similar- are necessary to ensure long term survival, then certainly it should not be purely across one group of employees. If the pilots are required to endure a loss of income, then sure as hell O'Leary et al should not be taking bonuses. And here in lies the necessity for representation in RYR - clearly MO'L, PB and the others in his management team won't be enduring the downturn in their conditions they seek others to accept.
But thanks for the kind thoughts, safety. An unthought out, ill informed knee jerk reaction that has summed up nicely a lot that is wrong with this industry.
What is it they say "walk a mile in another mans shoes, before judging him"....
Last edited by clanger32; 25th Jun 2009 at 10:35.