gorter
Setting aside what you call shoddy employment practices, the principal reasons why Norwegian applied for an AOC outside of Norway is that Norway is not an EU country, Norway has an open skies accord with the EU allowing unrestricted access to/from for all European airlines and Norwegian airlines, but this will not allow Norwegian to operate on routes between EU countries and other countries where an open skies agreement exists e.g.; Europe to the USA, they have a temporary permit for LGW - USA but that will expire in March 2016.
The Norwegian social taxes are very high and can near double the employment costs of hiring a pilot this would make it impossible for Norwegian to compete on a level playing field even if it was giving employees the same package as BA pays it would still mean its costs would be far higher than BA.
Norwegian, like Ryanair and to a lesser extent easyJet are a trans European airline and it makes perfect sense for them and for many employee's to pay their taxes and social contributions in the country where they are based as required by European law. The have also invested heavily in both Malaga & Barcelona in ground based activities such as customer call centres and marketing amongst other things.
Whilst they have migrated from agencies such as Parc, Arpi & Confair to OSM the bigger change is that all employees are now on permanent contracts with 3 months notice rather than the old 1 months temp contracts, OSM also manage the HR functions for NAR.ES which employs pilots after 24 months, OSM are an agency NAR.ES is an wholly owned subsidiary, its activities are outsourced to OSM
All pilots will very shortly be fully complaint with the requirement of the tax authorities where they are based as required by law, ask any ex Ryanair ex pat and that is a huge peace of mind, its not perfect of course, Spanish based pilots of Danish origin and there are lots of them have difficulties over the lack of a double tax agreement between Spain and Denmark.
UK based pilots are now paid in GBP removing the exchange rate risk from UK pilots is a huge bonus, ask any Ryanair pilot paid in Euro's how much his/her converted salary has fallen since the pound surged before Xmas.
Much of Norwegians problems this past year have been down to the long haul project/vanity/fantasy take your pick and the knee jerk reaction to the red ink last Autumn and subsequent 60 layoff's, most of that was sorted before it happened and the damage to individuals was reduced, not all where high in debt and some took extended holidays/reduced working and in a couple of weeks that will be history.
The present dispute in Scandinavia is much more complicated and i will leave that alone, but no one i know off in the past 24months+ was ever promised a core contract or core T&C'S and certainly no Euro base pilot expected one, some Euro based pilots have moved into core but only off the back of moving to a core base in Scandinavia some are temp in core (seasonal) some are now permeant.
Hopefully an agreement between the company and the union will reached this next 48 hours and an agreement that both parties can live with for longer than the 12 month here we go again dispute that has been so damaging, having said that anyone who feels that this will set a new bench mark in pilot employment will likely be disappointed