NO ONE LIKES A CHEAT
One sure way to strip a person of his dignity and ensure their deep resentment is to rob or cheat them openly - knowing there is nothing they can do about it. To then ignore to requests, complaints and pleas on the subject will only reinforce their loathing and contempt.
Why then does a company aiming to be in the top 50 or 100 or whatever brand names set about systematically cheating their pilot employees out of leave and/or productivity pay? Why does it wonder why its attrition rate is high and increasing? Is it not concerned about its image when these examples are discussed and explained outside the company to family, friends, and at social gatherings?
Is it really worth it?
A study of what the company makes out of its employees when it does not adjust the productivity threshold proportionately in those months containing leave days is a most interesting exercise. Every pilot should have a look at it.
I looked at 30 (a small selection I understand but a larger review underway) random November B777 rosters (15 Capt and 15 FO) that contained short amounts of leave ranging between 4 to 14 days. It became obvious that there deliberate directive to maximize the hours in these rosters through use of ULR/LR flights and roster compression to achieve as near to full productivity even though a large proportion of the month is actually spent on leave!
Without going into too much detail it is not difficult to see that a leave day should be given a credit of 2.8 hours at least. I.e. if the pilot has 10 days of this should be credited as 28 hours. Adding the rest of the months flying to this should give a total credit on which productivity should be paid. (In the old days this was in fact the practice leading to a fair system that ran well here for a decade.)
Anything else is simply theft - either of the leave or the productivity. Why should pilots be expected to work proportionately harder in rosters containing leave than what is expected of pilots whose rosters do not contain leave?
I have seen rosters containing 6 days of leave and still at the productivity threshold or higher, with no credit given for the leave which is then for all intents and purposes is lost. Stolen would be a more apt description. This is akin to making anyone else in the company come in on weekends and public holidays to make up for work hours lost when they took leave!
As the company can in fact assign leave then theoretically they could issue 4 sets of 10 days leave in the year, maximize the productivity in those months and get rid of their whole pilots leave debt for free! Up to a point this is also what is happening when they assign short periods of leave.
Back to the study of rosters containing less than 14 days leave… Without exception all the rosters reviewed exceeded the threshold considerably when a credit of 2.8 per leave day was included.
One captain with 60.25 credit hours had 13 days leave. Assuming the 2.8 hours per leave day would make his real credit 96.65 hours. He had been cheated out of 7000 Dhs. Another FO had 8 days leave and 77.17 hours. He had been denied of 6200 Dhs. On Average the captains were each losing around 5500 dhs in productivity. FO’s were losing 3900 dhs on average.
Given the amount of rosters examined it becomes apparent that this is a deliberate and systematic strategy by the company. It is less successful as the leave gets over 14 days in the month, but very effective with lower amounts of leave. The moral of the story – don’t take less than 10 days of leave. You’ll be giving most of it away.
Also interesting are the repercussions of this strategy. As ULR and LR flights are being used to maximize productivity in rosters containing leave, those flights are then not available to the rest of the pilots who don’t have leave in the month. The likelihood of doing shorter turn around flights for pilots with rosters containing no leave then goes up. That explains some of the roster dissatisfaction. Those with no leave in the month are less likely to get a ULR which many use for roster duty time control.
Another ripple effect is that the leave system is less likely to cope with leave allocation. Knowing what we know, who would be mad enough to bid for a short 4 to 8 day leave block unless absolutely essential? You might as well give it to the company.
To avoid getting cheated out of leave most will bid for longer leave periods. If pilots could bid for 4 days of leave knowing they would get credit then more would likely do so on an ad hoc basis. This would then free up the system to better allocate leave for the others. Previously when the system gave credit for leave and there were many who took short blocks of leave through the year and no surprise, leave satisfaction and flexibility was much better.
Is it really worth it? It is a leading cause of resentment within the flightcrew. It also impacts other systems reducing their efficiency and flexibility as people will desperately try to manipulate a system to avoid being taken advantage of and living with that feeling of violation.
A few thousand dirhams is a lot to an individual employee. But for the company, what they save by cheating their employees compared with a movement of a few cents in the oil price of the cost of another sponsorship is pennies, I must wonder who is sanctioning and supporting this contemptible practice. Is this what one would expect of a brand leader?
So while millions are spent on one advertisement with a celebrity, thousands of pilots are systematically cheated of productivity or leave, while the very celebrity promotes the excellence of the brand.
The company factor; pro-ratas and moderates every dirham from meal allowances to education. Why would they not pro rata productivity expectation on the few months we enjoy our precious leave? Did they miss the logic? Do they not see the obvious sleight of hand? No, it appears deliberate and dishonest.
And it’s definitely not it keeping with a leading brand. So I say to them – get it together, raise the game, be fair - and then the bounty will likely keep coming.
No one likes a cheat.