Dave,
First of all, thank you for you comments on this.
I'm going to disagree with you though on everything you have said, apart from the fact that this is an interesting situation.
A resign or no win situation - well, it's interesting you say this. But I would like to seek clarification as to why you have come to this conclusion? Firstly, knowing a lot more about the company than I would like to normally let on - I know that we have a lot more resources available to us than is believed. If you want a more detailed run down of the statistics, I urge you to take a look at the floatation prospectus. It claims we made £6 million last year, whereas if you go through the small print and all the other forms of financial writing, it proved that the company, in actual fact made circa £20 million in profit last year. The majority of which was written down or lost in translation, which fundamentally, I believe was because the company made the assumption that none of the pilots would actually understand the financial language written.
Against this backdrop, the directors increased their pay by 28%. I cannot say it was a payrise - because it wasn't. It was a "recontracting" which took place about a month before the floatation, increasing their basic pay by 28%. Again, if you look in the prospectus, it is as clear as day in there.
The money does exist - but the company are caught up in a world where they are chasing financial targets year on year, and as such they want to minimise out going costs. However... the pilot work force should not be one of them. The reason being is that we are behind the success of the company.
The Dash flies efficiently at the best of times - but we operated in a way that we knew we would use less fuel than we were plogged to do, we knew to minimise costs, we knew that we couldn't arrive into certain airports more than 10 mins early, so we slowed down. We worked hard for this company - 95% of the pilots out there worked on days off, or into discretion in order to make sure that these was less disruption to the operation and that the airline could retain some great credibility in the eyes of the general public. I myself, when there was a vast amount of snow around a couple of years ago, even took to informing passengers in LGW about why the delays were there, when Swissport had enough and went home.
Many of us would have done anything we could do for the company... and to give the big boss men a 28% pay increase, while giving away interest free loans so they could buy new houses, and allowing JF to buy another supercar, when 50% of the FOs in this company are wondering whether they will have enough money to see it through to next payday, or whether they will have to sell some of their possessions and live on beans on toast is just totally incorrect.
The money exists, but the entire thing is driven by one thing - and one thing alone. Human Greed. Right now, Jack Walker, who believed that his employees were the key to the success of a company, would be turning in his grave if he could see how WE are being treated right now.
As I said, the money is there. It's not that the airline is going to announce redundancies and write off it's most valuable assets (us)... they have to negotiate now, or JF and the cronies will lose a lot more than they ever thought they had.