Originally Posted by ATC Watcher
The Spanish and German situation are totally different in nature in the details .Also, unlike what happenned in Spain, in Germany the public and the serious media are not backing up the DFS.
Agreed, but there are also several common denominators worth calling out.
Spanish colective agreement was struck down by a royal decree-law and later by a law after about six month of slandering on the mass media. In spanish legal framework laws rank higher than colective agreements so... bad luck. In theory our constitution grants the rights to colective bargain but our complaint never reached the constitutional tribunal... a lower instance decided there was no reason for it.
After increasing our workload from 1200 to 1670 hours and reducing the percentage of rest time while at the same time firing a significant part of our ACC and TACC personnel (all above 57 years old) our government realized that the maths had been wrong and that by their own regulations there wasn't enough staff to do the work.
Since this is Spain, the solution was an easy one... issue a "clarification" on the regulation so that the amount of time is extended.
Sorry, it seems I got a bit carried away. Back to the point, while there are some notorious differences (mainly the judges seem to have more interest in upholding the law and not their own personal career prospects. Also a positive side-note your mass media seem to have a bit of professional ethos) in both cases, I can not stress enough the need to have a very detailed look at the spanish scenario.
History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.
As to what Sonnendec said, a heavy-handed action against german Atcos should be answered with industrial action across europe. We work under different providers yet several international organizations define our work (Canso for example).
Personaly I'm sceptical that we will find that much in common as a specific work branch... maybe when there is not much left to save
