Not funny:
Have you been to Swanwick lately? Have you sat through a duty and seen just how we lurch from one near crisis to another in terms of staffing? What goes on on a daily basis is a shuffle from sector to sector on a just-in-time basis to prevent someone going out of hours. Flexible we are, but what is happpening is akin to asking a pilot who is rated on an F50 and a 737 to operate alternate legs on the two different types of aircraft. One day he will use the wrong bit of knowledge on the wrong type of aircraft and something nasty will happen. This is just one example of what is happening, and it is solvable by proper rostering and flow management. However, the desire to minimise delays, admirable though it is, means that local and central management will not take the necessary action to ensure that the various sectors are given no more traffic than they can handle with the staff allocated to them for a particular duty. This firefighting then occurs.
You might not think that this is directly connected to pay. Pay is the reward you earn for all the work you do and the environment in which you do it. The working environment at present is not a pleasant one (except for being able to watch the ducks on the pond instead of burnt out cars around LATCC!), and therefore there should be increased reward to recognise the efforts we are all putting in. This is just a small part of it, and all the extra reasons that others before me have expressed on these pages are another part of it.
I understand that you have made up your mind and you think the pay offer is the best we deserve. My point remains therefore that if this is so, why should you accept a higher one if that comes along? That should be against your principles.
By the way, I am not fighting all of NATS. I am simply saying that if you and others who are not operational are happy with the offer then perhaps the time has come for operational ATCOs, the majority of whom we believe are NOT happy, to have a separate pay deal to recognise all the problems we have highlighted.
P.S. I see the issue of character legibility has made it onto the news again today. BBC Breakfast had an interview with a guy from Computer Weekly and a reporter standing in a bush at the back of Swanwick discussing NATS non-action on the HSE reprt on character sizes. 'A prototype is under development...' they said.
Last edited by eyeinthesky; 23rd May 2002 at 07:12.