The industry is truly in a terrible state with people are queuing up to sign up for a "permanant" position which leaves them unpaid for 3 months of the year!
Seeing as Willie brought Ryanair into this I'd like to remind people of a thread regarding unpaid leave at Ryanair last winter. Up to 1 month unpaid was proposed however it worked out at 1 week unpaid at 2 bases. This spawned 20 pages of outrage with responses such as:
"Madness. RYR have dragged this industry to the depths. They force every one else to follow them down. "
and
"The sort of fools who lap up the 'any job is better than no job at all' guff probably also believe that Gordon Brown is now the saviour of the world economy. The term gullible just doesn't do these morons justice. If Ryanair could fill its cockpits with these spineless tits (as opposed to the 60% we already have) then our pay would be considerably worse than it already is. There would be no lower limit to what these types would accept rather than confront the issue of erosion of their pay and conditions."
And when a couple of posters suggested there was little they could do about it and a month's unpaid leave was better than no job at all they received:
"The best way for you to assist progress (if thats what you really want) would be to crawl off somewhere and die."
and
"In a word, filth. You make me sick."
That was all down to one week unpaid, all very emotive but I guess that's Ryanair for you. Possibly the only response worth reading in that thread was a rather prophetic one from a poster called Gnirren:
"The real issue to watch out for is that companies want their employees to be contractors. It's a bean counter's wetdream, nothing but contractors to bring in and dismiss according to business needs. Job and income security for the crew? Gone. This will happen in many more so called "good" airlines in the coming years."
It feels like the first step towards our jobs becoming seasonal with Jet2 leading the way.....
Last edited by Joe Pineapples; 7th Jan 2010 at 11:54.