Let me try to sum up the facts:
- Salary.This privatization process includes 13 twrs (10 for Ferronats and 3 for Saerco). Although the cost for each tower or even each company is unknown, AENA will pay about €16 million a year for the whole bunch. Considering management costs about 35%-40% and a margin for benefits of, at least, another 10% we have roughly 8 million left for paying salaries. Divide that between the staff needed (at least 150 controllers) and you get less than 55.000€ gross annual income per atc. So I believe there is little margin for bargaining. At this point I shall also have to remind you that your income tax as a worker and resident in Spain will be not less than 35%.
- Permanent contract. There is no such conception in Spanish Labor Law anymore. Since last february’s legal reform, any company may reduce any signed T&Cs or even layoff workers with only claiming any significant reduction in their benefits forecast. BTW, the assignment of this twrs is for 5 years plus a possible extension of one more year. After that no one can guarantee these companies will continue providing any navigation service in Spain.
- Radar rating. Forget about working with it. None of those twrs will provide app service. The only thing that AENA has consistently made clear during the last 2 years is that they reserve the provision of area and approach control for the state company. This is due to severe legal, instruction and staff limitations. There’s also little to no chance for you to eventually sign for AENA, since all this privatization process is precisely seeking to move all current Spanish controllers to ACCs, thus making unnecessary further recruitments of radar rated atcs in the next 5 years or more.
- Language. Hope you have a good level of Spanish. Although you may use English in frequency regularly, many VFR pilots won’t (and some of the airports move more VFR than IFR traffics). And of course all training with the local staff will be held in Spanish. But that’s not even the most important point: imagine all the vital conversations you’ll need to hold with many workers of the airport (fire brigade, marshals, flight plan office staff, engineers…). They will be working for another company and none of them are expected to speak English, but you must understand them perfectly or your job will be harsh.
- Transition process. Your instructors for the local rating should be the outgoing atc staff. What you may be missing is that they are not willing to. This process means they are going to leave their workplace, many of them will be forced to move out really far away with their families and so on. Also it must be noted that not only the new ANSP have shown their intention not to comply with the only valuable option the Labor Law gives to the current staff, that is, the complete subrogation with the new company (maintaining their T&Cs), they have offered even less salary to the locals than to foreign applicants. If that wasn’tenough, the government is enforcing all current controllers in these twrs to obtain the OJTI rating and threats with huge fines to anyone not cooperating with the training of the new workers (obtaining the OJTI rating and working as an instructor is, and should always be, voluntary across all Europe). Some call this process a perfect example of dumping, I personally think the term piracy fits better here. Thus you may imagine what kind of environment you will find in these twrs. The locals are really pissed off and I guess every person participating in this mischief will be received with great disdain, if not open hostility.
- Other labor considerations. You will be working up to 1670 hours annually plus 80 additional extra time (voluntarily?, who knows…), on shifts devised by the company alone (and they have scarce legal limitations on this matter), only 30 days off (again, whenever the company decides), no social benefits, no union…
- And last but not least. I strongly recommend not to sign any contract as atc in Spain before reading and fully understanding the “Ley de Seguridad Aérea” (AirSafety Law). Wiping out any trace of the “just culture” it allows fines from 90.000€ to €225.000 to atcs for simply any unjustified action they may consider affects the traffic flow or labor discipline.
So far as I can recall. Feel free to post any further questions or comments. Also, I would appreciate if any of you could share any new information about talks with Ferronats or about any colleague joining them.
Ciao.
Last edited by pamplinas; 18th Apr 2012 at 17:10.