As Mr Judkins,( thanks for saying who you are, can at least find you for a beer now!) says we could go on for ages, so I am not going to fill up broad band ! View points differ, long may it be so. I was not saying anyone was ignorant and I am no guru on industrial law either, so thanks for the reference ! If all have read it (I have not!) great, you know what is coming. All I feel is that it is not something you do lightly, you have to be smart and use logic or you get taken to the cleaners. If there is a good plan , great, but just a "lets have a strike" is probably not a sound basis for one. "We need something and we have tried all else to no effect and have now gotten to a brick wall and this is the only way we can express our determination and we are prepared for it so as to have every probability of succeeding" , now that is something else!
As to no election for CD, until JF came along as an alternative, it is pretty average practise in most outfits like BALPA to continue on with what you have and if uncontested not bother with a members vote. You would have all been pissed of to have had a ballot expense that gave an option of zero choice I assume ! Anyone who reads the rules and wants to put forward someone as a candidate can, there is no veto. Perhaps it being done at the very last moment so to speak, caused some of the perceived problems. As it was contested, rightly a vote was taken.
As to the mechanics of replacement, the time issue is just mechanics. We must and no doubt will get a new Gen Sec of high calibre, I never said that the ultimate replacement was going to be a crap candidate, but even JF admits that he is not a candidate for permanent Gen Sec so whatever his skills, they are not intended to be the ones we use in other than the short term. So, 2 months as JF says to find someone, then go through the ballot process, production, voting etc, I think that takes about 2 months based on the last one. So now 4 months from now we have an elected candidate, who we assume has a job to give up. Minimum notice, probably a month , but could be longer, 3 or even 6, hence the basis of my statement that we have at least 5 months to go before ewe get the person in place. Nice if we members actually get a choice on the ballot paper , otherwise terms like "stitch up" may start re-appearing!
As to the article in the Log about rest. It was written the way it was to deal with off duty activity and was the result of concern expressed to BALPA about off duty activities and adverse effects on rest. It was not intended to address the duty aspects at all. That is an FTL issue and your CC, who negotiate your FTL scheme, which all of us hope does not and should not lead to you becoming fatigued due to your working practise. If it does then we need to do something about it and fast! By the way, there is a definition ofr this which is broadly that there is tiredness, which happens after say a normal day , whether just up late at a party or working and fatigue which cannot be countered by normal rest. However the article was not written about duty, read it again, it is about what people do on their days off. It is written to encompass everything for a definite reason. That is because if certain activities which could be tiring and of interest to some, who for example read this forum, were to be specified, then some others would have them included in duty time. As most of us seem to be working hard anyway and have little spare time available to legally increase our duty times, then some of those specified activities would be effectively stopped! If you want to send me an E- mail I can more directly answer what I am getting at, but who knows who reads this ?
Hopefully the last communication from me on the Gen Sec issue !! Thanks to all the readers, fly safe!!
Martin Alder