I don't know half of what happened behind "closed doors", so to speak, so I am not attempting to defend the indefensible.
My hunch is that unless people confirm the veracity of the information they splash all over various forums, all they will do is inflame the situation, rather than engender a sense of solidarity.
I still wish someone could outline to me how a multi-base airline like Regional can run with LIFO but another multi-base airline within the same group cannot run with LIFO?
The situation is, in the words of Gunnery Sergeant Highway, a major "cluster****".
sjm,
Isn't that clause contradictory? What is the Regional Transfer Agreement? Or is that a clause dealing with "Base Transfers" once in employment?
Still, its a shame, IMHO, if this "protectionist" attitude prevails within the group.
Regards communication, bmibaby had a BALPA Forum, which every member was subscribed to, on which members could voice their opinions about whatever they felt like.
But hardly anyone ever used it.
It seems to me a more sensible use of the collective resource/sentiment is for one of the IT-inclined pilots to set up a neutral, non-associated forum which every baby pilot could contribute to and for the debate about the "way forward" to take place before ditching the existing status quo.
You will never convince a proportion of the pilot fratenity that the IPA have the resource to represent pilots on the "global" stage which BALPA attempt to do.
When in 2012 we lose the right to set our own FTL's, and fall into line with Europe, are you going to wish you'd had a Union that can see the bigger picture and do something about it?
Not much use fighting for 11 days off per month, but winding up flying a 1000 hours per year is there?
Apologies if the IPA are doing something about this issue. I can't see anything on their WWW site to suggest it is...
What I would fear is that the industrial unrest prejudices what is a critical year in which, by all accounts, the company are actually on target to make some money.
At the end of the day, I''m fairly sure that, at this point in the macroeconomic cycle, that is really the only thing LH care about.