Air China Expats

[Fluke]

Wondering if anyone has completed a contract with Air China ( Beijing), and has any comments, good,bad, indifferent ? Currently considering an A330 offer but have no contacts there, nor do I know of anyone who has worked there previously.

[Fareastdriver]

You will have to wait until somebody who is contracted to Air China answers your post. Forget comments from Air Macau and Shenzhen Airlines. They are in a different ball game.

[vbrules]

Any info on current A330 skipper contract on offer?

[alghazal]

Yep, same here, would do anything to Leave EY nightmare schedules, insulting salary and puppets management.

Please someone PM please

[C.galerita]

People,
Be very wary with dealing with AC or of the US employment company supplying pilots for them.
As one of a group pilots who recently, over many months of negotiation, set up a deal with them, only at the death nell of going across to Beijing for interview and sim had the agreed contract dramatically altered. You can guess in who's favour.
We all pulled out of the deal.
You can contact me if you are interested in learning more, especially if your Oz based.

[C.galerita]

DrunkenAir

I am unable to pm you via PPrune - make yourself available for email's and and I will do so.

For those others interested - a short history:

A contract agreement was negotiated over many months by a group of Aussie pilots with AC through FY.
Without going through all the details the most important considerations as to why we all pulled the pin is as follows:

• Payments were to be made after Chinese tax with an indexation component. These were removed.
The original agreement was for the payments to be made from AC only. It was changed to being divided between an AC payment plus a payment via FY.

For Australian tax purposes it was imperative that a document showing Chinese tax paid be supplied. If it wasn't, then the remuneration payment could incur Australian tax. We had no response from AC or FY on this and it was a main sticking point for our group.

Extensive discussions with the ATO were made to get their view. The result being that if the tax paid by AC could not be verified then more than likely Australian tax would be due, especially if the pilot was based in Australia.
Imagine after some years of working on this contract that the ATO comes knocking on your door with a 48% tax bill!! It’s happened before.

• The overtime was to be set at 80 hours each calendar month. It was changed to 240 hours in each three calendar months. Thus, if you worked hard on two of the months and soft on the third, you would not receive any overtime.

• The original contract stipulated that full salary was to be paid from date of employment. Now not the case.

There were many more points, too many to post here, but all in all we as a group felt that we had negotiated in good faith. When at the death knell the contract was blatantly altered, it destroyed our trust in the people we were dealing with.

Be careful.

[C.galerita]

People,

Further to my previous post I have just found out that the contract you may be receiving is the original contract that was negotiated between our group and AC. This has all the points that we had agreed to.

As I said, subsequent to this AC came back with their own version just prior to our interviews. So be aware of a possible switch at the last moment. I have a copy of this contract if anyone is interested.

I would suggest that all try and get together and form a united front to any contract negotiations.

Feel free to contact me.

[Fluke]

C.Galerita and Sky330
Thank you very much for your detailed history of the deal and spin on what AC are attempting. Information coming back from people doing the interviews now, confirm what you suspect. The tax aspect has to be crystal clear and it is most definitely NOT. Nor does the contract match the originally advertised conditions. Interestingly Rishworth now want B737 drivers for AC as well, I wonder if this will blow out to the 747/777 fleets.
Thanks again, if I can find a scanner will PM the "agreements" Fluke