The key thing about this latest offer from the Orange House of Horrors is that it is not being given to untrained pilots - it is being given to type-rated Airbus pilots who have spent the summer working for easyJet and are about to spend another summer doing so. The more I listen to Slim, and his more intelligent and eloquent fellow traveller Leo, the more convinced I am about the need for a union. I cannot really work out if these are decent guys with genuinely held views against all the evidence (that is known as a delusion incidentally), or management plants, a la Dr Goebbels, who just loving trot out their master's views however alarming they may be. In either case they are manifestly wrong in just about any piece of logic they apply to anti-union rhetoric. Good reading nonetheless.
This is merely one of countless abuses of pilots at easyJet, and the only restraining factor on even greater excess is the presence of BALPA. There is no doubt that due to the strength of BALPA 'in situ', the company has decided to go for an attack on the weak underbelly of the pilot community - the newbies. These are people who in employment terms are in 'no man's land' as they never really belong to easyJet as direct employees. They are instead enslaved to the increasingly-immoral CTC under easyJet's Brookfield equivalent, the 'flexi-crew' system. In practice that means coming into aviation with massive debt, being used and abused by the pond life at CTC for pennies who gladly leave them with even greater debt, and then being replaced by even cheaper young lads and lasses a couple of years later. They have no rights and no real future -they are merely the canon fodder of the aviation industry who are being used to pay for the obscene bonuses that are so prevalent in our company. I accept that right now BALPA is not able to give the protection to these people that they would like, but the matter is in hand. CTC have increasingly become complicit in the flagrant and outrageous abuse of young pilots and are increasingly under the spotlight for their totally unacceptable participation in shameful employment schemes. How the managers at CTC sleep in their beds at night is frankly beyond me, given the deals they are negotiating right now 'on behalf of' their own people in an effort to circumvent the involvement of BALPA. BALPA are fighting battles on about 6 fronts at the moment, and given the ferocity of attack they are facing are doing well. Slowly but surely we will win against CTC, however far from reality that aspiration may be today.
I have no real desire to try and persuade the Slims and Leos of this world about the merits of BALPA - that would be like trying to train hyenas to become vegetarians. I do, however, desire to persuade every single pilot at easyJet that the only real hope for our company is a vibrant BALPA fighting on behalf of the pilots against ruthless management. In the next few days, what is being negotiated by CTC with easyJet to overtly abuse their own pilots will come into the public domain. Any of you who thought that slavery was a thing of the past will think again.