British Airways - CC Industrial Relations & Negotiations

[Andyismyname]

Wow, Human Factor, that confirms what I had thought could occur under SOSR.

We are being led up the garden path toward unemployment.

FOR ANY CABIN CREW OUT THERE, PLEASE HAVE A LOOK AT I-resign.com - Community - Dismissal for SOSR - Some Other Substatial Reason


Andy

[T4Turtle]

A Thought

"Ask What You Can Do For Your Airline And Not What Your Airline Can Do For You?"

[Reargunner]

Plodding Along :

take the 18 hour rule for example,crew will more often than not take the full 18 hours rest, not because they need 18 hours sleep but because they believe "use it or lose it".

Is that the 18 hour rule that says the company should plan 18 hours between duty at Chicago and Denver, but if off schedule the cc will reduce to the usual minimum of 12 hours?

Or is the 18 hour rule that says the company should plan a minimum of 18 hours off if there is no local night, because a day rest is more draining than a night rest, but can be reduced to 14 hours?

I don't know another 18 hour rule...but maybe you are more familiar with my working agreements that I am.

Don't all employees have working agreements? Don't all working agreements place limits on the way the company operates? In that sense, everybody has restrictive practices.

I've flown for BA for many years and I have never had to divert or night stop in a disruption because of cc hours...the pilots are always forced to stop working before us because the scheme limits are an hour less for them. There isn't an option...the law won't allow the flight to continue.

I also don't know the story of the Denver flight diverting. Isn't that one of the trips where the pilots have to carry a heavy pilot in order to allow them to take rest? Is that why the pilots could have legally continued beyond the cc limits?

I thought that the pilots also had industrial agreements (aka restrictive practices) with BA? Don't you expect and indeed insist that BA plan the operation around those? This does not strike me as a shocking reluctance to allow BA to be profitable...nor does it suggest to me that BALPA are running ops. Yet some of the posts on here sound quite frantic at the idea that cc and BASSA have the same basic expectation.

By the way, Slickster, Bealine is one of our ground staff and has an enviable reputation for exceptional customer service and great team work...I'm not sure that his refusal to try to blame all the problems on his colleagues in other departments is any reason to pity him. Like he said, we can easily turn this thread into a very long list of examples of apparently bloody-minded behaviour. We all know they have happened on both sides of the cockpit door.

Finally, (yes, I agree, far too long-winded!) Why is there this repeated assertion that cc still work to 1970's style agreements and that we have avoided any changes? Do these posters actually know anything about BA cc? Is it purely the fact that we are a unionised workforce, and some people have a visceral reaction against the idea of unions, that perpetuates this myth?

[TorC]

Originally Posted by Andyismyname

Wow, Human Factor, that confirms what I had thought could occur under SOSR.

Lizanne Malone is leading us up the garden path toward unemployment.

FOR ANY CABIN CREW OUT THERE, PLEASE HAVE A LOOK AT I-resign.com - Community - Dismissal for SOSR - Some Other Substatial Reason


Andy

Yes, that makes a very interesting and informative read. An ESSENTIAL read in fact.

I was handed a sheet of paper at CRC yesterday. Not headed, but reportedly from bassa. I've binned it, but the jist of it was that if anyone gets a new contract in the mail from BA, then they should not sign it. The idea seemed to be that if none sign, then come the 91st day, BA will be unable to operate.

I imagine bassa sees that as the time that BA just rolls over and agrees to whatever bassa wants.

Given that Unite has lawyers, I find it impossible to believe that bassa is not aware of the real implications of what they are suggesting, adding to my suspicions that there is another agenda. An agenda not being shared with their members.

To any bassa members reading this thread, please please please share the above link with as many people as you can.

[yotty]

Posted by Bealine .... All of us must stand shoulder to shoulder and tell Walsh and Broughton exactly where they get off this bus to nowhere. If my £16,500 + Shift Pay (giving me just over £20K) is cut, then personally it doesn't bother me in the slightest whether British Airways survives or not, apart from losing my rather pathetic pension and a small shareholding. Indeed, if my salary is frozen for another year, I shall have to seek an alternative career! Maybe this is what our esteemed leadership team have in mind?

I suspect it bothers a great many other BA employees if the company goes under ... me included ..

[TheKabaka]

From the i-resign link

Actually, you will not be dismissed at all, and this is an important distinction. What will happen is that you will have your contracts terminated, with notice, and will be offered a new contract to run, with continuous service intact, from the end of the termianted contract. If you fail to accept the new contract, in law, you will be deemed to have resigned.

The reason this distinction is important is that you will be unable to claim unfair dismissal - you will have to claim constructive unfair dismissal, and the difference is huge. Cutting to the chase, constructive unfair dismissal means that the burden of proof shifts from the employer to you, and very, very few cases of constructibe unfair dismissal are ever upheld. It is a claim that I would seldom recommend anyone trying without specific legal advice throughout, including before resignation, and even then, I would caution that the chances of winning are so slim as to be negligible.

[Tiger]

however this is ok?
Revealed: £200,000 pay rise for chief of ailing BA pension fund - Times Online

yotty..

agree with your post.

Earn same as you and what have I to loose? See the big earner have more to worry about, lower end well answers on a stamp.

[cessnapete]

Reargunner

What some of us are trying to say the passengers should come first, they pay our wages.
During a disruption not of the company's making, the vast majority of F/C will check the legal FTL's ,and taking account of any safety implications on the day, get the job done. Not as happened recently in Sin and Pwk, dump hundreds of passengers because BASSA would not alleviate the 3 local night INDUSTRIAL limit. Then cause the a/c to be flown back empty to Lhr by the F/C after their minimum rest.

[Dutchjock]

Earn same as you and what have I to loose? See the big earner have more to worry about, lower end well answers on a stamp.

Big earner or small earner, everyone has mortgages and other monthly bills so we all have similar worries. If the company goes down none of us will find a new job in the current climate. And you certainly won't make 20k on the dole.

I find it utterly amazing people actually want the company to go bust rather than get a pay cut. Do you really want to loose your house, car etc?? Do you realize how much stress this will put on your personal life, your marriage etc?

The economy is in the sh*t and the company is in the sh*t. The priority is to keep the company going. If that takes a paycut now that's too bad, but why don't you make your union fight for an agreement that gives you a payrise of some sorts when things get better?


Here's another extract from the article referred to earlier:

In the employers position, rather than continue to argue this out I would respond by withdrawing the entire proposal and immediately announcing consultations for compulsory redundancies. You have utterly no idea how unpopular this is going to make you, when peoples livelihoods are on the line. The employer won't need to "slit your throats" - you will have colleagues who will happily sell you down the river for free. Please remember, in redundancy, all an employer has to demonstrate is that they are cutting jobs and that they have used a "fair" selection criteria - they do not have to prove that they have a need to make redundancies.

[Reargunner]

Cessnapete,

Agreed. My experience is that the pilots have always done that. I have never been delayed or disrupted without all the crew pushing to the legal maximum hours.

The only times I feel that acts of goodwill are unlikely are during disputes, such as when BALPA were trying to win the right for the new pilots for Open Skies to be included on the bidline, or now for the cc.

The agreement for 2 local nights (not 3) rest on an ultra long range is unlikely to be something cc will happily surrender when it is so central to the the current dispute.

Personnaly, I am not certain it is a rational response...but it is very understandable I think. The company want is to agree to work without a 2nd night on long range, so surrendering it (even on a disruption) at the moment is not going to be viewed as a good idea.

I'm sure we all know that these problems come down to the very basic lack of trust between employer and employee in BA. The complaint that some cc are excessively trusting of their union is also (IMO) based on the fact that our relationship with our managers is so poor.

All I was pointing out was that our working agreements are not so restrictive as many are suggesting and that portraying us all as uneccessarlily and irrationally militant is innaccurate.

[Stall Pusher]

Having read BA' proposals, unlike most of the people commenting here, the changes to the Disruption Agreement are by themselves untennable. Crew would not have a fixed roster anymore. Just a change of wind or a few spots of rain would be enough for BA to invoke the new Disruption Agreement and your forward roster goes out of the window.

BA's plans are to make crew on 75% contracts work much harder. A clue to this is that only downward changes to contracts are on offer from BA at the moment.

[Classic]

Reargunner

Don't all employees have working agreements? Don't all working agreements place limits on the way the company operates? In that sense, everybody has restrictive practices

.

Yes, but the philosophy in an airline is that the operation will be planned in accordance with that those agreements. However, if an aircraft goes tech, or snow totally disrupts the operation, the "professional" approach to our work now takes priority, getting the job done and passengers to their destination. This will involve going beyond industrial limits and going to legal limits if necessary. Bassa regularly veto that option.

I've flown for BA for many years and I have never had to divert or night stop in a disruption because of cc hours...the pilots are always forced to stop working before us because the scheme limits are an hour less for them

Well many thousands of your colleagues have! Often the crew aren't even told they have a choice - Bassa tell IFS management that the aircraft will nightstop, and it then happens.

Pilots are legally limited to one hour less than cabincrew's legal limits, but cabin crew industrial limits in nearly all cases are less than our legal limits. Pilots too have industrial limits, but once the pilots have commenced the duty, they will in 99.9% of the time continue to legal limits.

I also don't know the story of the Denver flight diverting. Isn't that one of the trips where the pilots have to carry a heavy pilot in order to allow them to take rest? Is that why the pilots could have legally continued beyond the cc limits?

Pop into the Bassa office and ask them. Willie went mad!
The cabin crew would have been able to go on 1 hour longer than the pilots, even with the third man. It was the Bassa enforced industrial limit that resulted in them telling Operations management to divert the aircraft.

I thought that the pilots also had industrial agreements (aka restrictive practices) with BA? Don't you expect and indeed insist that BA plan the operation around those?

Absolutely, but once past the planning stage, ie we're on the aircraft, in the event of disruption we will almost always continue to legal limits. IE GET THE JOB DONE!

Why is there this repeated assertion that cc still work to 1970's style agreements and that we have avoided any changes?

Things like :
2 nights rest in Prestwick, stranding passengers,
Delaying aircraft to wait for an extra crewmember as Bassa won't allow the aircraft to go one down,
A destination payment if the bunk rest area light is u/s,
No fixed links at Heathrow (Every other airline does them!)
CAT payments, when there's no longer the CAT lounge....

I could go on.

PS Good to see you come over from CF. I can't post on there but regularly read so much that is factually wrong. So it's good to pass the true situation onto you, so you can repeat it there!

[Ancient Observer]

Well....

It is rather sad to read all this. As a now-retired from Aviation potential SLF, - that is, a potential passenger who might pay money for flying with BA, rather than someone who might get paid money for flying with BA - I find it amazing that BA CC appear to want to join the UK dockers, miners, steelworkers and etc who stuck out for what their unions advised them to stick out for, and by doing so more or less ended those sectors in the UK.
I do not "have it in for" low paid CC, nor do I hold anything against the silent majority who probably want to do the right thing for the airline. I don't have a particularly positive view of some of the BA senior managers that I've met. However, I do object to the historic practices reported here.
Just to get at one fact - what is the current sickness level of lhr based CC? That is, how many days sick are claimed, on average, by those CC?

[Charlie Pop]

We have 14500 cabin crew. The company plans on 550 being sick on any given day, rising to 850 on popular social weekends. So that works out at a minimum of 13.84 sick days per year.

[Reargunner]

Hi Classic....I don't post on Crew Forum either...I have read some stuff on there. Perhaps you are thinking of the old Av forum that closed...I used to get onto there?

I do not think that I ever suggested that there isn't a difference between operation as planned and operation when off schedule. Nor did I want to suggest that pilots do not regularly go beyond their agreement to get the job done.

As you pribably know, the cc agreement is that a non long range duty day should be planned up to 12.5 hours, but if delayed we extend to 16.30 While the long range trips are planned over 12.5 hours and we can extend to 19.15 duty hours. All those duties were agreed in the negotiations following 9/11....not 1970.

However, the idea seems to be floating around that there should not be a limit, (I guess (hope) from non-flying contributors). Or that the general limitation to the operation is the cabin crew. Yet, in general, the point at which the c crew find their delayed flight cancelled or recrewed is when the pilots hit the legal limit. This has been the only kind of disrupted trip I have experienced in 24 years.

Out of home base we do not habitually work with reduced crew compliments except during periods of disruption...the difference being that if we work one down whenever BA say they are short of crew, then there is, in effect no point having an agreed crew level.

On average 200 cc leave every year...what is the incentive for BA to replace that wastage if there is no operational imperative for them to? I appreciate that the pilots do not ever face the same issue, because BA cannot legally cut the flight crew compliments, and that it may seem out of date to say that we will not fly from base with less than the agreed levels. But, where do we draw the line?

As far as your comment on fixed-links for EF goes...I'll have to ask you to explain what one is...the whole EF agreement was created about 10+ years ago and I left Shorthaul (its predecessor) about 20 years ago.

Charlie Pop, am I right in thinking that your sickness calculation is based on a working year of 365 days? As opposed to a normal working year which would not include an employees annual leave or days off? Isn't the norm for uk industry to calculate such things based on about 260 days? That would mean the average sickness rate is 9.86 days.

[Swedish Steve]

Is that the 18 hour rule that says the company should plan 18 hours between duty at Chicago and Denver, but if off schedule the cc will reduce to the usual minimum of 12 hours?

Or is the 18 hour rule that says the company should plan a minimum of 18 hours off if there is no local night, because a day rest is more draining than a night rest, but can be reduced to 14 hours?

I don't know another 18 hour rule...but maybe you are more familiar with my working agreements that I am.

This is shorthaul nightstops after disruption.

last year we had an aircraft arriving at 1800 every day. The cabin crew got off to operate the 0915 the next day. They had a 3 sector day in. If the aircraft arrived about 90 mins late, the 18 hr rule meant the morning departure went late due cabin crew rest.

It is always cabin crew rest that delays outstation departures, never flight deck.

I suppose it is because the flight deck do a 3 sector day ex LHR and transit LHR in 45mins, while the poor cabin crew are forced to get off at LHR for a couple of hours, which means their working day is longer.

Anyway, nowadays the crew get off the 1500 arrival, to keep the first wave on time.

[Charlie Pop]

Reargunner: you are quite correct, the average would work out lower on a comparison with office working days and I forgot to factor that in. I did still go for the lowest possible sick days in my example based on 550 per day rather than 850, so 9.86 days is the rock bottom sickness rate, and rather more days per annum than I've ever taken in any job. Perhaps I'm lucky?

On the issue of crew complements, I understand your concern that BA would consistently roster flights to the the minimum complement if permitted to. It would be interesting to take a wider perspective on the matter and consider if it would actually be worth their while doing so. Reduced crew complements means slower service from a customer perspective. I travel as a passenger on BA enough to know that sitting with a meal tray in front of me for an hour when I need to get to sleep is irritating and could lead me to consider a competitor airline. Putting 12 crew on a full jumbo to Hong Kong would undoubtedly be a great advert for Cathay Pacific! On the other hand, we need to ask ourselves is it really necessary to put 15 crew on a Boston flight with only 150 passengers booked each way, an example which is not unrepresentative of the way we find out aircraft these days. It's my opinion that with appropriate checks and balances in place there's no reason why variable crewing levels shouldn't work. If the the booked load on both sectors leaving London is light then why can't we go with 12? Most times the flight return doesn't fill up, if there's a cancellation and it does then we bite the bullet and deal with it. In my experience good CSDs will switch crew from empty cabins to busy cabins to balance the workload. If that can be done informally then why not allow it to occur formally to facilitate flexible crewing ex-LHR?

[Reargunner]

Charlie Pop,

Yes, I asked management why we don't have flexible crew matrices on longhaul some time ago and the response then was that the airline was making most of its money through the sale of premium tickets (ie fully flexible fares) and the feeling was that the saving would not be worth potential costs in limiting those sales.

I am sure the current situation is very different and the option could be very workable (as I am told that it is those high yield fares that have gone away).

The other balance that would have to be considered would (I guess) link to your other comment...if a 747 left with 12 crew and one person became sick or injured we would be returning with one door unmanned, so the overall stability of the operation could be affected.

I have not seen any light loads yet...because the current response has been to sell a LOT more of the cheapest fares...and fill the aircraft at almost any price. Plus reducing flight frequencies means everything has been full. I was talking about this on my last trip. Perhaps this policy is just a very temporary measure?

Clearly, the planned 14% reduction in c crew will mean a reduction of heads and hands onboard, but how the airline will eventually decide to manage that cut will depend on what their larger/longer strategy is. No doubt Mr Walsh will indicate some part of this at the AGM.

[Reargunner]

Swedish Steve,

I'm afraid I have a very limited knowledge of the Eurofleet agreement...I have never worked on it. Why is the flight delayed by an hour and a half regularly? Doesn't it sound as if the trip was badly planned in the first place?

I was told by the managers at the IT Day that Eurofleet is generally pretty flexible. Is that not the case?

I'm suprised that you feel the crew willfully and happily cause disruption...generally I find that c crew HATE to lose their forward roster because they have to cancel their life until it becomes stable. Not knowing when or where you are going is such a huge problem.

[Megaton]

On SH I have been asked plenty of times if we're going to be late. The reason?Crew wanting to get knocked off their next sectors so they can go home early.