Hey there, LH2:
just wondering, did any of my colleagues happen to steal a girlfriend from you in the past? Seriously now, I think some kind of negative bias can be detected in your writting, and there must be some reason for it, no?
Well, it looks like if you should start by reading any of the Performance Reports from EUROCONTROL. There are not that manuy drawings as in a comic book, but if you give it a try, I´m sure even you´ll get to something ...
As you can see from the data from my colleague, the number of hrs/yr in Spain are far more higher than in the rest of the main european ATC service providers. For your knowledge, in the Spanish amount of hrs. training is not included; the french include more than 100 hrs. of training, in the rest I´m not sure so I wont say anything. The 1800 hrs of 2007 in Spain were not mandatory, only 1200, the rest were overtime and not everyone worked them (I didn´t). Now we will have to work 1750 hrs mandatory, and that is insane if you consider safety.
Finally, as I understand it, the reason behind the swift action by the Spanish government was to prevent the controllers from carrying out their threats of going on strike over the Easter holidays.
Well, here you are not well informed (and this is only an euphemism). We were not on strike, as we have never been on strike since 1986. In fact, we had expressed our intention to cooperate with AENA so that neither companies nor customers suffer any problem with their Eastern holydays. There was an agreement valid until march 30th by which Spanish controllers secured overtime hours necessary to attend the rise in the demand of air traffic. So there was enough time to achieve a new agreement (almost 2 months), and the Spanish control union USCA had already presented plans for a 30% reduction in the salaries. But there was never any intention on the side of AENA nor the Spanish goverment to reach a deal good enough for both sides. The decree-law published last friday 5th is abusive, anticonstitutional, and violates the current agreement between AENA and its controllers, as well as the Spanish Workers´Statute. And the Spanish goverment knows this, but they also know that Justice in Spain is very slow, and very influenceable. In the time we would need to prove the unfairness of this decree-law they are going to rip AENA into small pieces and sell it as they wish and fits their interest.
From what I've heard that is wide open to debate. For example, what is, and what has historically been the position of the controller's union regarding workforce expansion?
There you go, once again, wonder were you get your "information" (again, another euphemism) from ...
USCA has been demanding new controllers from AENA for the past 10 years. We are now almost 2400, but only a bit less than 1800 operational, the rest is on office duties. In comparison, France has 4000 operational controllers. AENA has prefered to pay expensive overtime instead of selecting, training and hiring new controllers (from the economic point of view for the company, it was much cheaper).
... in a country with ~20% unemployment rate ...
I supose you agree with me it would have been better to have hired more controllers in the past, don´t you?
... as a group they never did anything to improve the safety or the efficiency of the astonishingly poor service they provide.
No problem here, coming from someone like you, I wont take this personal.
BTW, they haven´t started yet distributing yellow stars among us, but when they do so, I´ll let you know, maybe you would like to lend a hand. It must be so fun!
Enjoy!