Air Berlin announced the conclusion of its first labor agreements with pilots

[Walter Sobchak]

An important and noteworthy announcement has been made yesterday in Germany. It has quite a media coverage even down to local news.

Air Berlin announced the conclusion of its first labor agreements with pilots and cabin staff. The deals, covering members of both the Vereinigung Cockpit and ver.di unions, are effective from Aug. 1 and were agreed to "on the basis of the present actual working conditions at Air Berlin," the airline said. The agreement covering compensation runs until Dec. 31, 2008, with the accord on work rules expiring one year later. AB employs 805 pilots and 1,442 flight attendants.

It is certainly a foot in the door to improve things in the long run. Hunold must be blue in the face with rage as it is a personal defeat.


Now it is your turn Ryanair!

[hetfield]

Again, Vereinigung Cockpit did a great job.

[MD11Engineer]

Thanks to the pilots and F/As, now Hunold can't refuse negotiations with the ground staff unions anymore. A precedent has been set.:E

[Airbus_a321]

Again, Vereinigung Cockpit did a great job.:confused:
What means "AGAIN" ??? - I've heard they are only doing (probabely) a (good) job for their main members and so to protect and to strengthen their positions. A lot of pilots call them Lufthansa-Vereinigung-Cockpit - nothing else.
So just don't be too optimistic.
If they (VC) have to decide for whom they have to do "again a good job", you could probabely be very disappointed - especially if you are not part of the big LH-real-pilots-community:=
years ago, it might be almost forgotten history, but it still could give an appearance ot the VC, as a guy in the position of beeing president of VC said:
"only LH trained pilots are good pilots".
At this time there was quite a big resignation of all the (bad, worse) pilots who had not got the advantage to be a GOOD LH TRAINED PILOT

[Flughaven]

So what was "negotiated?"

What improvements and pay increases did the pilots receive?

Very interested to know.

Cheers

[hoschi]

The published Manteltarifvertrag (MTV) and Vergütungstarifvertrag (VTV) were worked out by the company management and Vereinigung Cockpit (VC.) Until the proposal I didn’t know, that there were direct negotiations between VC and Air Berlin. A handful colleagues started the initiative to install a VC guided Tarifkommission in order to create a Mitarbeitervertretung, which was demanded after an internal vote. But I think most of us didn´t want the VC taking part of this, because of reasons like mentioned by A321 and other facts happened in the past ( Monitor report etc.). The MTV and VTV are containing almost the present working conditions. Additionally 7 salary group were added. Interesting for pilots, who are joining the company for more than 15 years (I guess less than 1 % at the moment). According to our CEO, who always declines a union within Air Berlin, “this was a strategic decision”. Maybe with regard to a future fusion with LTU and DBA, both having different MTV and VTV, both demanding for more money. For the VC it is the first step into the second biggest airline with more than 800 pilots.

Fact. No changes of the present working conditions until the end of the MTV (31.12.2008).

[Denti]

In case of a fusion with dba or LTU the contracts are cancelled immediately and have to be renegotiated except if air berlin guarantees the pilots of dba or LTU respectively to keep them on their respective working conditions and payscales. The MTV has to be renegotiated in case of Subpart Q coming into force.

In any case both MTV and VTC are nothing more than just the first step on which future contracts can build up, that requires of course a much bigger part of the pilot corps to be organized which is very unlikely at best.

[hetfield]

Yes many years ago VC was mostly DLH.

Now pilots of Eurowings, Contactair and Hapagfly are members of the Executive Committee and represent the increasing number of non-DLH pilots.

If you think VC doesn't fight for pilots beside LH, what's your recommendation?

Ver.di or no union at all?

[Airbus_a321]

@hetfield
straight forward question - straight forward answer:
as a non-DLH-pilot everything else is better.
As you mentioned e.g. "eurowings-pilots" as a confirmation that now pilots of "other companies" are also involved as so called "decision-makers" in the VC board, be aware! It's a fata morgana, nothing else but a camouflage. Eurowings is like a puppet-on-a-string in the big DLH-web, same like contractair, germanwings etc. e.g.: If you want to apply for positions in those companies your way is via DLH only.
Pilots at AB do have quite good conditions. No need to bring the :mad: VC into this company. What will they really change? At the end of the day they may try to screw down AB to the benefits of the DLH-(mafia)-web? This would not be the first time in VC history:*:mad:

[climbout]

..Hopefully you don't really fly an A 321..

[MaxBlow]

A321, you sure sound like AB management.

Having a good and strong union support prevents management from scre.ing us over and over again. Have a look at all the deals that AB management and that other clown (dba/ltu) did in the past and what the outcome was for flight crews. Did working conditions improve at all ?
:ugh:

My 2 cents only - of course!