Guv,
If you have a quick read of the second paragraph of my post you will see that I believe that neither party is providing the correct figures. BALPA will of course understate the pay of their members, but it is also in BA's interest, in the face of forthcoming wage negotiations, to overstate flight crew pay. So (at the risk of repeating myself) the
true situation is somewhere between the two.
I agree that some sort of impartial formula is required, but the pay proposal did perform some of these calculations using both BALPA's own figures and BA's. Unsurprisingly BA's figures all painted a somewhat more rosy picture, but they all pointed in the same direction ie
that we work just as hard, if not harder, than most of our colleagues in the UK and Europe and are not recompensed accordingly.
Desk-pilot - Thank you for joining the debate (and that is meant sincerely
). I think it is important that we see the arguments from the other side, especially how we are perceived by other members of the airline. What you must understand is that a lot of the anger about the current proposal comes from the fact that it does not affect our colleagues equally. A junior pilot is losing out (percentage wise and possibly in real terms) on a much larger increase than the senior guys. If it was suggested that the guys and gals in your department who had been there longest were not to take a pay cut at all and that the hardest hit were to be the youngest / most junior chaps then you could expect a bit of a stink, wouldn't you? You would also expect that when the company recovered that your salaries moved back up towards their previous levels.
Our pilots take the survival and health of the company as seriously as anyone else in the company, if not more seriously. We all tend to stay with the company for the long term and our skills are not as easily transferrable as other staff. No-one on the flight deck has joined BA for "something to do for a few years after college" and how many non flying staff have stayed with the company for 30 years plus?