Hi all,
first a little background. I work for BA but I live in Spain. I am, indeed half Spanish as well. However, I am no expert on anything here. I did, however, want to put a point of view across.
Firstly, I do sympathise with the plight of the Spanish pilots. Many of them have been more than kind to me in the past with help getting home and to work.
Having said that, I do feel that IB pilots should wake up a bit and smell the coffee. We at BA have been relinquishing T&C's (and complaining about it) for over 10 years. We have given up much: 1/2 hour on our Sch 10 may not mean much to most of you but in layman's terms it is a 4th man on all Hong Kongs, Sao Paulos, Rios and others others. 2 days leave recently in order to inbibe BMI and not let our management create a BA express at LHR as well as a whole host of other work coverage related sacrifices. It all started 11 years ago with a cheese board and all allowances were included in normal pay. To SFO's who'd been in the company some 7 yrs that meant about £2,000 a month as they were in a position to start bidding for the plum trips.
I won't even go into the changes to our pension over the years but suffice to say that we have to work 10 yrs longer in order to earn the same on retirement. Some of the blame, admittedly, is Gordon *&%$()g Brown's fault.
Ever since we have been bailing BA out of their troubles. However, in reality they are not BA's troubles, they are OUR troubles. If we wanted to have a long career in a stable airline, then we needed to make changes; and we did. Painful as they were we now have a viable airline with solid (ish) finances. At least as solid as an airline's finances can be.
As many of you know, in our recent history we had a crisis with the CC. The CC union behaved in much the same way as SEPLA are doing now. They would walk into meetings saying: "The answer is no, what's the question". They went at Willy with water pistols and they got water cannon in return.
The trouble with intransigent unions is that they start on a route from which the only return spells humiliation. Willy will destroy SEPLA like
he did BASSA and that is bad for the pilots.
SEPLA will say that they offered this and they offered that but what they did not do is listen to what management had to say. Unions these days are not about resisting management; they are about understanding their business and its problems and not allowing management to pull the wool over their eyes. They understand little about the problems facing airlines (and therefore their livelihoods) and think only of themselves. A Union like that really deserves to be humiliated because it serves no-one but itself.
The parallels with BASSA are staggering: the negativity, the bravado, and then the dissemination of unprovable propaganda in order to discredit their adversaries in a last death throe of angst and bitterness.
I have been, in the past, one of our union's harshest critics. I have complained and kicked and punched and bitten at every give-away we ever made. Anyone who knows me knows this to be true but I have to admit that were it not for some very cool headed and intelligent people at the helm of the BACC, we would have had a very similar fight on our hands.
Spain has had the misfortune of a dictatorship until 1976. The net effect was to go completely the other way for too long now without actually addressing some of the attitudes prevalent especially in government owned institutions. A country who is only just waking up to the fact that it is not the worker who should be protected at all costs is having to learn very quickly in order to survive. The inflexibility of its labour market is really paying negative dividends now.
They have always wanted to play a part on the world stage and they elect governments to help them get on that world stage but when it comes to doing what it takes, they don't like it because it changes their status quo. There has never really been much of a sense of community and sacrifice in Spain. Witness the slow decline of Spain as a nation by separatists.
They want IBERIA to be a world class airline and yet they want that to be done their way. If you want to become a world class airline then you need world class leader. In Spain, today, there is no such thing.