Virgin Atlantic pay allowances to their crew downroute. They are not included in CAA's figures as ours are. We are on average better paid than other airlines but we are actually NOT the only employee group in the company who is. Our very own CEO is paid more than the CEO of Air France-KLM and almost £200.000 more than the CEO of Ryanair. I could not be bothered if he has more executive experience than Barak Obama. The latter has far more responsibility than Willie Walsh yet earns less. When T5 was opened and became a huge fiasco, people were craving for Willie Walsh's resignation but he still remained in his position. He has created a negative IR framework with IFCE and very heroic of him to decline two bonuses and volunteer to work for free for a month, as he did last year, but I gather it is easy when you earn almost £800.000 a year.
Has the strike not achieved anything? I would claim that it has. Some crew agree that the top-up payment is better than the MTP option. The more you work, the more you get paid. With MTP they could have easily worked you down to your knees for same amount of money. There has also been some other improvements which we have not seen in previous proposals. Why are they refusing to include any sort of payment in our basic salary? Would it be more difficult for BA to change it in the future? Surely the pilots had no problems getting it included in their basic salary when they exchanged their previous allowance system with an hourly pay system?
The wall at Waterside NEVER should have been placed there. What was the intention? To turn everyone against us and to divide us further. There was no other intention. If we did something similiar we would be suspended on the second. There always appears to be different sets of rules. We can see a similarity in their recent offer which they are offering to non-union members and in a couple of days we will be receiving an ESS which claims that thousands of crew members have accepted it.
SOSR? This is also something which has been discussed for a very long time, and according to some, something that was going to happen earlier this month. How many crew are they going to dismiss? Over 5000?