expediteoff

Hear, hear - Just ask your questions and nod sagely during the Joint Briefing. You're not going to get anything other than the agreed party line from the Management/NTUS side.

Now, when the Management leave the room...let this be the time to unleash the full force of OUR opinion to OUR Representitives as to what we feel about this situation.

OUR representitives assured us during privatisation that the pension was safe.

This IS the time to fight - Be under no illusions, if you take a step back on this, there will be no Pension five years down the line.

fisbangwollop

If we give in to this scam we will be pished on by Barrons boys for ever........this year the pension,next year leave...etc etc etc.....I wonder how our French friends would react to this???...One real puzzle for me is how our Union reps have taken the bait hook line and sinker???.....lets hope we dont see them all taking world cruises and driving Porsches in the not too distant future!!!!!!!

throw a dyce

Small Tale.
The North Sea divers and teckies went on strike last year over a 40% wage increase.The oil companies had been dcking them over for ages,until enough was enough.So the big bad bold oil companies took them on.The strike lasted less than a week,and cost the oil companies millions.They got their money.
We have this power.If we kowtow then there is very little hope left.The good thing here is that in this part of the world,if we strike we will cost the oil companies millions again.
Barron is very small fry,when it comes to pissing off BP,Shell etc.So is NATS.

Air.Farce.1

NATS management will try it on, especially if they think we are weak, which employer wouldn't ?
However......... enough is enough, let's take a stand and show them what we are made of . If we don't ....

Vote NO

ZOOKER

fisbang,
Not really a puzzle if you consider how many "Union Reps" are now allegedly "Managers" or "Management Wannabes". - Ultimately with bigger pensions than their 'shaftees'.

INCA9

Now, I don't profess to be an expert on this, so if i'm getting the wrong end of the stick then I'm happy to be corrected. From my limited experience, here's how I see it:

I like to think I'm a relatively realistic person. As a relatively new member of staff (post ppp) I can see the argument that final salary pension schemes are a huge burden to any company and are becoming rarer because of their associated cost.

BUT, and it's a big but, that doesn't necessarily mean that i'm just gonna put my hand in my pocket and bail Nats out without exploring the options.

Cleverer minds than mine i'm sure will correct me but is Nats not a 'not-for profit' organisation? Have they not posted profits of 10's of millions of pounds over the past few years? What happens to that cash?

If it did come down to me sacrificing some pension rights over the remaining 30-odd years of my career, I'd expect Nats to never post a profit....Ever again! 'Cause if they did then that would just be money that could and should be ploughed straight into the pension fund! And whilst they're at it they could put all the profit that they've recently declared back too.

I'm willing to be reasonable about things, but so far all I see is the 'company' as an entity looking after it's own interests and expecting the staff to pick up the tab!

Plus the whole idea that we can't pass on costs and even need to reduce our charges between 2011 and 2015.... Hold on, pretty much everything I've bought for the past couple of years has increased in price drastically. Do you know why? Because for one reason or another companies' costs are increasing and they're having to 'pass that cost on' to their customers! How come we're excluded from that little party?

Add to that the whole 15 year proposal = sleep now, get shafted later, and mine will be a polite but firm NO, bordering on the shove it! Come back with a better offer/idea and perhaps we'll talk, but until then, keep dreaming!


One final quick question if anyone can answer it:

The defined pension benefits of those in the pre-ppp scheme are protected, right? The new proposals claim not to change the benefits of the pensionable salary.
But by changing the 'pensionable salary' itself are they not simply hiding behind semantics? Can they really get away with that?

mr.777

INCA9...my sentiments exactly.
People here need to grow a set of brass ones fast and not fall for the Union spin. VOTE NO

kinglouis

if we are to go down the strike road, am i correct in thinking that all our office chums will be striking aswell?
or will it be operational staff staring down the barrel of the gun and left out in the cold to fight for everyone in the company. i hope not and would like to think that we would all stick together. its just that im kind of thinking the whole ctc mentality (and please correct me if i am wrong) is different from us ops people and they may believe all this company trash spin they are spouting at these meetings?

lets all stand together and tell the company to ram it. if we do not we are royally and truly screwed and baron will be rubbing his hands with glee like the grinch at xmas.

chocolateorange

"The Trust of a Promise prevents NATS from forcing employees who were members of the scheme at PPP into the new scheme"

and the rest of us?

"In addition, NATS and NTUS have agreed a 15yr Memorandum of Understanding under which pensionable pay increases are capped and which also guarantees that there will be no pressure of any kind on employees to leave the scheme and join the new one...."

I may be reading this wrong, does this guarantee run out after 15yrs?

I just don't see how we can be expected to trust management to keep any new promises when they can't keep the ones previously made

eglnyt

Whilst it may have been the intention of Parliament to preserve the pensions of NATS staff what the Transport Act actually did was to make it almost impossible for NATS to change the Trust Deed which sets out what those benefits are. What is protected are the benefits as defined in that deed. It appears that those benefits are defined according to pensionable pay but exactly what is pensionable pay doesn't seem to be protected. It may be semantics but that is of course what the law is all about and how lawyers ensure the future of their profession. In NATS the concept on some elements of pay being non pensionable is far from new, over the years bonus parts of the annual pay settlement have been non pensionable and most of the blood money bribes were also non pensionable.

The trust of promise ensures that members of the pension scheme at PPP can remain members as long as they are employed by NATS. Currently there is no protection at all for anybody who joined since PPP although it is to be hoped that their colleagues would take some action to protect them if NATS tried to force them out of the scheme. The 15 year MOU might actually give those people more protection than they currrently have.

NATS can't recover all its costs because the Government decided that as a monopoly it should be regulated. The Government appointed regulator then decided that NERL was too expensive and should be subject to an RPI-x charging regime to encourage efficiencies. That same regulator has indicated that it is not prepared to allow NATS to recover all its pension costs in charging period 3 hence the problem. That regulator is of course appointed by the same Government that some people on this forum think would look after our pensions if we were re-nationalised.

There seems to be a great deal of misunderstanding about not for profit. Yes NATS makes a profit but almost all of the profit is ploughed back into the business either by paying off loans or as investment. If you look at the Annual report you'll see that there has been quite significant investment at the same time as reducing the total debt. Only a small amount of the profit has left the business as dividends, 5% of which went to NATS staff. Were NATS to make large profits which were distributed to shareholders the regulator would soon step in and stop it. Indeed it is likely that if NATS was to use the profit to fund pension payments rather than investment the regulator would reduce the amount it can charge accordingly.

This particular office chum won't be taking any industrial action likely to preserve the pensions of operational staff at the expense of my job. The amount I might lose in pension by the RPI cap pales into insignificance compared to the amount lost if I'm not a member of the scheme until retirement.

PPRuNe Radar

And with management having won this battle due to a divided workforce, when they come for your job in a future cost cutting exercise, you won't mind if everyone else just looks the other way I guess ??

mr.777

Maybe you should think about the fact that if there were no operational staff you wouldn't have a job

Air.Farce.1

eglnyt

Like I said before, the "car park" is empty at weekends when ATC staff are working their b***s off , earning the company a fortune. The same car park could be empty during the week and the company is still earning a fortune.....you get where I am coming from

Gonzo

Some people on this thread very seriously need to consider broadening their somewhat myopic view of their own specialised profession.

anotherthing

With the likes of Eglynt and Mr.777, it looks as though the company has already won the pensions battle by dividing the workforce.

The people at CTC actually do a lot of work that provides profit for NATS - if we are not allowed to pass through cost in the future, don't you realise how much higher a percentage the non operational staff contribution to profit will become?


Lets face it, how many people here gives a monkeys about other people in the company - we're are all altruistic - we only care for ourselves at the end of the day.

Send NATS to the wall and get re-nationalised - lots of job losses.

Make NATS lose loads of money through indistrial action - lots of job loses.

Yes, us operational staff will be safe in the main, but it p11ses me off when people talk about 'one nats, one pension' and the greater good when they can't see what effect industrial action might have on colleagues.

I have not yet attented a briefing - as it stands, I am not happy with the proposals and therefore tend towards a NO vote.

However, I know that the pension needs a hand - how that happens is what I am interested in. The pension cannot survive in its present state for every member, current and future.

By all means vote NO to this initial proposal, but realise that something needs to be done, to safeguard both the pension, and the jobs of fellow workers!!

Mad As A Mad Thing

Come on people, play nicely While it may be true that the car park is relatively empty at the weekend, that's because those jobs don't need to be done on an instant basis like the operational controlling. There's a big difference between the admin staff taking the weekend off, compared with just not being there at all.

Let's not kid ourselves that us ATCO's are the only heroes who "work" for the company. After all how many people do you know who aren't ATCO's who have a clear idea of what our job really entails?

We need to stick together across the company, NERC/NSL, Admin/Engineers?ATCO's & ATSA's and anyone else I might have missed out. Divide & conquer is management's usual tactic, let's not make it easy for 'em eh?

"A downtrodden class ... will never be able to make an effective protest until it achieves solidarity" H.G. Wells.

just edited to say...nice to hear some sense being talked by people who obviously type faster than me

250 kts

Apart from this paragraph it is an extremely good post and addresses many concerns.

But if you are a member of any of the 3 unions please abide by the democratic decision no matter how unpalatable it may be.

FDP_Walla

Quote

"Like I said before, the "car park" is empty at weekends when ATC staff are working their b***s off ."

Nice one Air Farce 1 and Mr 777. These constant jibes on here, NATSNET and the like show an ignorance that defies belief.

If you are all working your 'b***s off', how come you aint too tired to go in for some AAVAs at £550 a pop.

How can we fight together if we dont respect each other.

You are. I suggest doing the Barons dirty work for him.

BDiONU

Ahem, there are ATC staff working at CTC, even some operational ones. As I have posted previously just because you don't have visibility of the work the backroom boys and girls do doesn't mean they do nothing. You'd very quickly notice the effect on the systems you use if those CTC staff weren't there to support them. Not to mention how other things get done, like the move of AC and TC to Swanwick, the move of Manch and ScACC shortly to Prestwick Centre. Who set all of the systems up, tested them and got the place ready for occupation by operational staff, magic pixies?
I'd love to work weekends/nights and get paid UHP (and for ATCO's even if they've not held a validation for 20 years they still get NOS) but there is no requirement in my job, so I can't.
Air.Farce.1 your view of the company and work done outside of your tiny little area is myopic, there's an awful lot more involved in an ATC operation than just the bit done sitting in front of a radar screen.

BD

Air.Farce.1

Enough said, rant over. Lets not do managements job for them

Lets "all" stick together