Galling though it may be, Not funny does have a right to his opinion. The pity is that as an engineer he feels his job is at threat (so Prospect tell us) so therefore he has to accept whatever crumbs come his way or he might get made redundant. It might be true or it might not. I don't know enough about the engineering side to know whether an Air Traffic engineer is easily replaced by someone from an outside contractor at a lower cost. If he is, then that is market forces and maybe Prospect should be negotiating separately for them and all the hundreds of admin staff who get offered the same as us for relatively little effort...
The point is that market forces make Area Control ATCOs a limited commodity and therefore valuable at present and therefore we should be rewarded accordingly. There are any number of pilots out there just waiting to jump into an airline seat so perhaps the present pilots also feel threatened (not forgetting the cost and time taken to train new ones...). We are not in that position either, and we are being regularly shafted by our local and central management due to a weak approach tken by IPMS/Prospect and the staff themselves in the 8 years that I have been in NATS. The time has come to change things, and the likes of NotFunny will just have to take their chance. I hope that his principles and agreement with the NATS logic will mean that, should we manage to achieve a better deal, he will be accepting only the first offer... I BET HE/SHE WON'T.
The other point is that we can rant and rave (preferably without getting personal), but we will have to abide by the result of any ballot, however uncomfortable that may be...
