Flypuppy and InFinRetirement
[edit - InFin, your last post above popped up while I wrote this. Did you actually read the one above by me addressed to Northern Sky? If so, you will surely see that I am fully aware of the law on bonding. I merely question whether or not me-judice is. I will now edit out the only remark I acknowledge is unacceptable.]
I wonder if I might ask you to do something? If you take the time to read each other’s last posts you may be quite surprised to read that you each have a lot in common.
For example, you both argue for bonding on moral grounds, at least so far as they apply to your employees. Again, you both seem to wish us to accept that you love/d your team and had great respect for them, particularly those that were loyal to you.
But most importantly, I feel, you both refer to just one individual who ‘done you in’, so to speak, with respect to running off after training. OK, InFin, you counted up those who had gone elsewhere but you made no claim that each of those had jumped ship immediately after training or while bonded.
It really is interesting to see the similarity in thought, moral stance, and tale of betrayal by an employee that you share – AS EMPLOYERS.
Now, may I ask if either of you acknowledge the existence of airline employers who let down their employees, or lied to them, or conned them into taking a job with a bond and then used that bond as a coercive tool? Oh yes, such employers do exist.
And so we get down to the nitty gritty at last. The fact is that there are at least as many abuses BY employers as there are OF employers. And I think, in fact, that we might agree with each other in many ways, especially with regard to the way we should treat each other as opposed to what happens in daily life.
InFin is right to point to a deep seated mistrust underlying employer/employee relationships – and not just in the UK (look at the SIA thread, or reflect upon the OZ pilot dispute). That mistrust is, I aver, founded upon bad experiences on both sides. Why, then, does this have to continue? Why this ‘us and them’ approach? So very much of what InFin has to say is actually in favour of change, despite his assertion that such change “will require a new sense of well being - and hell might just freeze over before that happens”.
Well being is, as InFin says, a sense, or a state of mind. It does not in fact take very much to change the collective state of mind. The question is simply one of who will start the ball rolling? Frankly, I think that is down to the employers. As RD has rightly said, employers in the US adopt an entirely different approach – and it seems to work without bonding. Why can’t we try that here?
Though I speak out strongly against bonding, I am the first to acknowledge that bad employees need to be taken to task, perhaps by their peers. That surely does not mean bonding for the vast majority of us.
I am old enough to remember the days when bonding did not exist in the UK airline vocabulary and, frankly, I believe that the esteemed profession of airline pilot was at its peak at that time. The slippery slope down which the profession has been sliding for at least the last 20 years has more to do with a fundamental, collective greed and selfishness than with the imposition of bonding. Bonding agreements are a symptom of the underlying disease.
When will employers and employees alike wake up and reject this ‘us and them’ philosophy?
[This message has been edited by tilii (edited 12 April 2001).]