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I don't understand why you are trying to convince others how bad CX is or will be in the future. If you believe that yourself than the only reasonal option is to leave.
So if you actually did leave it begs the question why you still go on about it. As I said, you are standing in front of a shop protesting without the intention to buy anything anyway. What's the point?
If you did not leave you invalidate your own line of arguments. I could not take you seriously anymore, with all respect.
And back to the shop, CX had to close the shop because of their insane government forced them to. While they were closed they only required a bare minimum of staff, so they used the imbalance between staff looking for a job and scarcity of positions to offer less money. Brutal, but from a business point of view reasonable. Other shops could open way earlier, and hence acquire new merchandise, hire/ train staff back and promote their product.Time will tell if Cx will have to raise salary again in order to have enough staff. I am sceptical, but would be great of course.
Reopening routes takes time, pilots are just one mosaic piece. You need to rehire local staff, promote the reopening, arrange maintenance, bring the ac out of storage, undust it and apply for slots, traffic rights and negotiate fuel and local engineering. What you are asking for is much much more than keeping thousands of pilots on indefinite standby at full wage ( that alone would have been suicide), you are asking for the entire ops to just sit there for years ready to go anytime. It's completely unrealistic. EK and SQ, all the American airlines etc are not better managed, they are just lucky to be based in countries with shorter Covid restrictions.
I
So if you actually did leave it begs the question why you still go on about it. As I said, you are standing in front of a shop protesting without the intention to buy anything anyway. What's the point?
If you did not leave you invalidate your own line of arguments. I could not take you seriously anymore, with all respect.
And back to the shop, CX had to close the shop because of their insane government forced them to. While they were closed they only required a bare minimum of staff, so they used the imbalance between staff looking for a job and scarcity of positions to offer less money. Brutal, but from a business point of view reasonable. Other shops could open way earlier, and hence acquire new merchandise, hire/ train staff back and promote their product.Time will tell if Cx will have to raise salary again in order to have enough staff. I am sceptical, but would be great of course.
Reopening routes takes time, pilots are just one mosaic piece. You need to rehire local staff, promote the reopening, arrange maintenance, bring the ac out of storage, undust it and apply for slots, traffic rights and negotiate fuel and local engineering. What you are asking for is much much more than keeping thousands of pilots on indefinite standby at full wage ( that alone would have been suicide), you are asking for the entire ops to just sit there for years ready to go anytime. It's completely unrealistic. EK and SQ, all the American airlines etc are not better managed, they are just lucky to be based in countries with shorter Covid restrictions.
I
Cathay is very “risk averse” and like to sit on their hands and wait. The fact it takes them 3 years to put a route in place compared to other major players that can start a route in 6 months.
CX hands down is very mis-managed (Fuel hedging - Apple contract - Price fixing, etc….).
Have you ever been in a meeting with Flight ops and Planning? If you have, you would note that the major obstacle they’re trying to overcome is the lack of crew (both flight and cabin crew), engineering, over fly rights etc can be sorted in a matter of months. You’re right crew are a piece of the puzzle, but the piece holds its weight a lot more than others.
it doesn’t matter if I’m with CX or not, I know how this company is haphazardly managed and mistakes always flow to front line staff and management walk away with bonuses.
When Covid hit, the company, in a heart felt plea asked staff to take unpaid leave (SLS) on multiple occasions, to help the company, they make personal, then when they did the whole “sign or be fired”, it’s just business.
Most companies that have strong Staff retention, show mutual respect for each of their staff member.
CX went from being regarded as a world class airline to being the equivalent of VietJet but with Catering.
And that right there is the kicker. This is not what a lot of us signed up for. Stuck by financial responsibilities and seniority. Watching management spend a dollar picking peanuts out of poo instead of buying a packet of nuts for 20 cents. As the seniority list marches back to 2400 and the profit share is jiggered to always be zero.
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I was working under a different contract, Not a handbook. I didn’t ask for COS18, I was very happy with my old contract. Whether I moved on or not is irrelevant to this discussion. But it’s in the best interests of people applying to have an idea of what they’re getting themselves into.
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I was working under a different contract, Not a handbook. I didn’t ask for COS18, I was very happy with my old contract. Whether I moved on or not is irrelevant to this discussion. But it’s in the best interests of people applying to have an idea of what they’re getting themselves into.
Your claim Cathay is much slower than other airlines to return to pre-pandemic levels is questionnable. EK not before Summer 2024, as an example.If you take into account that EK could restart earlier, this would give Cathay until 2025 to be at same rate.
https://aviationweek.com/air-transport/airlines-lessors/emirates-needs-all-its-a380s-reach-pre-pandemic-level-service-clark
Last edited by corporal klinger; 19th May 2023 at 14:47.
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Corporal Klinger is clearly management , trying very hard to justify the decisions made to cut salaries and benefits .
cathay used to have a huge amount of goodwill amongst the crew both cockpit and cabin . That’s long gone . The short sighted attitude of management that if you shake a tree hundreds of pilots will fall out no longer holds true .
In the past I used to look for ways of shaving a few minutes off the flight time . It took some effort , now I just couldn’t be bothered . It doesn’t sound like much , but multiply that by hundreds of flights per day it soon mounts up .
P.s. some excellent posts on this page
cathay used to have a huge amount of goodwill amongst the crew both cockpit and cabin . That’s long gone . The short sighted attitude of management that if you shake a tree hundreds of pilots will fall out no longer holds true .
In the past I used to look for ways of shaving a few minutes off the flight time . It took some effort , now I just couldn’t be bothered . It doesn’t sound like much , but multiply that by hundreds of flights per day it soon mounts up .
P.s. some excellent posts on this page
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I don't find it irrelevant at all if you are still at Cathay. Quite the opposite actually.
Your claim Cathay is much slower than other airlines to return to pre-pandemic levels is questionnable. EK not before Summer 2024, as an example.If you take into account that EK could restart earlier, this would give Cathay until 2025 to be at same rate.
https://aviationweek.com/air-transpo...-service-clark
Your claim Cathay is much slower than other airlines to return to pre-pandemic levels is questionnable. EK not before Summer 2024, as an example.If you take into account that EK could restart earlier, this would give Cathay until 2025 to be at same rate.
https://aviationweek.com/air-transpo...-service-clark
EK’s profit margin was 9.9%. It’s no secret that they are short of crew, despite paying pilots more than they did pre-covid, and a contract that wipes the floor with CX on every single metric.
Will CX achieve a 9.9% margin this year? No, of course not. They never came close to that in the many years I was there.
The fact is that just like post SARS, there is a window of huge pent-up demand. CX has been unable to capitalise on it, unlike SQ/EK etc. the reason for this is because of an acute shortage of frontline staff. The reason for that is (for pilots) the imposition of COS18.
Airlines restored pay and brought back their crew (or the crew they wanted), and are able to recruit. CX can’t get their departed crew back, and the only ones they can find are local cadets, who will be SOs in 18 months time. I’m no manager, but looking at the experience/rank demographic of those who left, are they being replaced with like for like capability?
The opportunity cost will be several billion.
They deserve everything they (don’t) get.
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I don't find it irrelevant at all if you are still at Cathay. Quite the opposite actually.
Your claim Cathay is much slower than other airlines to return to pre-pandemic levels is questionnable. EK not before Summer 2024, as an example.If you take into account that EK could restart earlier, this would give Cathay until 2025 to be at same rate.
https://aviationweek.com/air-transpo...-service-clark
Your claim Cathay is much slower than other airlines to return to pre-pandemic levels is questionnable. EK not before Summer 2024, as an example.If you take into account that EK could restart earlier, this would give Cathay until 2025 to be at same rate.
https://aviationweek.com/air-transpo...-service-clark
Most restrictions placed on crew were ideas of management, enacted into law by the THB, they sold your rights and everyone else’s rights to keep operations running.
Also don’t forget, we were told that if we left any luggage in the bag room at dispatch, it’ll get thrown away! But now conveniently we can leave it there as long as we pay for it!
I’m glad you love CX, but they will do the same again in a heartbeat! There is no other airline in the world that did that.
Last edited by Babyjet_dododo; 20th May 2023 at 07:08.
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We all joined cathay as mercenaries. It was always a ****hole company to work for. But they paid well enough, provided well enough benefits and most importantly had a good enough contract to attract us all. They used the contents of the contracts, specifically certain provisions of it to entice us to join. How you could calculate your career-long earnings, how "last in-first out" meant your chances of losing your job in times of strain would be reduced thus your loyalty and longevity rewarded.
When they cut our pay & benefits in half, we didnt have our jobs anymore, we then had only half of our jobs. Not temporarily, but permanently.
Imagine if cathay had somehow not lost almost half of its pilots in 2.5 years and could now be matching the record profits EK & SQ are raking in, with the cathay pilots now making half as much. How convenient would that have been? That's what cathay managers had dreamt of with their bet. How delusional could they have been? They treated their employees with harsh disloyalty and the result is biting them in the a$$. They can't attract employees at any level, even the non-skilled short term classifications such as ramp workers.
They should have laid off a certain percentage they couldn't use and didn't want to pay for sitting at home, like every other respectful airline does, with the express promise of returning to work once things pick back up. If pay & benefits cuts were absolutely needed, they should have been made clear to be temporary until the crisis passes. It's not just what they did, it's how they did it. Never engaging us via our collective representation union or otherwise about any of it. One morning they told us via email our contracts are canceled and sign this new thing (which isn't a contract by any stretch of imagination) or you're fired in 2 weeks. Utter disregard with a big middle finger.
Thus they flushed down the toilet permanently all of those important factors they had used over the years to lure us mercenaries to work for them. None of us grew up dreaming of flying for cathay pacific of hong kong one day, none. We came for the money, and the contracts they so intently held up in front of us pointing to its shiny provisions.
Back then they knew correctly they wouldn't be able to attract unless they offered the compensation package they offered us. Somehow they placed a giant bet they could now somehow attract/retain the pilots they need without that compensation package. Well that bet has proven a bad bet in a bad way. Even if they would have been to replace every one of those almost 2000 pilots who have left with new ones 1 for 1, imagine the training cost. Not that cathay has the training capacity to train much more than a couple of hundred off the street pilots a year anyway. It never had. There is a need for a considerably larger training department with its astronomically higher cost. What they have done is costing cathay considerably more than keeping all those pilots on payroll until now. But like I said, their colonial low character won't allow them to ever admit a mistake, by even attempting to correct it.
Now having lost any credibility as an employer they're reaping what they've sown.
A lot of us who have left cathay are here to warn others.
A lot of them don't realize that cathay is hiring them under "NO CONTRACT". Only a loose document amendable at anytime in any way at sole discretion of the company. Everything cathay is telling them in the process of hiring them is a lie. What money theyll get paid, how much their housing cost & conditions will be, what aircraft fleet they'll be on, upgrade times, etc.
If we don't put on display here what a toxic employer cathay is, where else would prospective newhires get the truth? From cathay itself? Laughable.
Cathay is a sinking ship with incompetent & unscrupulous management at the helm. Act accordingly.
When they cut our pay & benefits in half, we didnt have our jobs anymore, we then had only half of our jobs. Not temporarily, but permanently.
Imagine if cathay had somehow not lost almost half of its pilots in 2.5 years and could now be matching the record profits EK & SQ are raking in, with the cathay pilots now making half as much. How convenient would that have been? That's what cathay managers had dreamt of with their bet. How delusional could they have been? They treated their employees with harsh disloyalty and the result is biting them in the a$$. They can't attract employees at any level, even the non-skilled short term classifications such as ramp workers.
They should have laid off a certain percentage they couldn't use and didn't want to pay for sitting at home, like every other respectful airline does, with the express promise of returning to work once things pick back up. If pay & benefits cuts were absolutely needed, they should have been made clear to be temporary until the crisis passes. It's not just what they did, it's how they did it. Never engaging us via our collective representation union or otherwise about any of it. One morning they told us via email our contracts are canceled and sign this new thing (which isn't a contract by any stretch of imagination) or you're fired in 2 weeks. Utter disregard with a big middle finger.
Thus they flushed down the toilet permanently all of those important factors they had used over the years to lure us mercenaries to work for them. None of us grew up dreaming of flying for cathay pacific of hong kong one day, none. We came for the money, and the contracts they so intently held up in front of us pointing to its shiny provisions.
Back then they knew correctly they wouldn't be able to attract unless they offered the compensation package they offered us. Somehow they placed a giant bet they could now somehow attract/retain the pilots they need without that compensation package. Well that bet has proven a bad bet in a bad way. Even if they would have been to replace every one of those almost 2000 pilots who have left with new ones 1 for 1, imagine the training cost. Not that cathay has the training capacity to train much more than a couple of hundred off the street pilots a year anyway. It never had. There is a need for a considerably larger training department with its astronomically higher cost. What they have done is costing cathay considerably more than keeping all those pilots on payroll until now. But like I said, their colonial low character won't allow them to ever admit a mistake, by even attempting to correct it.
Now having lost any credibility as an employer they're reaping what they've sown.
A lot of us who have left cathay are here to warn others.
A lot of them don't realize that cathay is hiring them under "NO CONTRACT". Only a loose document amendable at anytime in any way at sole discretion of the company. Everything cathay is telling them in the process of hiring them is a lie. What money theyll get paid, how much their housing cost & conditions will be, what aircraft fleet they'll be on, upgrade times, etc.
If we don't put on display here what a toxic employer cathay is, where else would prospective newhires get the truth? From cathay itself? Laughable.
Cathay is a sinking ship with incompetent & unscrupulous management at the helm. Act accordingly.
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But you can fill in the people engagement survey! And tell them what needs changing. But, as the CP of Airbus says in his news letter "WHY BOTHER?" Because we all know what the result will be................NOTHING!
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The estimated operating margin for 2023 is 9.19% based on 8.1 B profit estimate. ( some analysts upgraded profit est to 8.7).
I believe indeed we will see high profit years, especially with HKIA expansion, and only if Xi doesn't invade or siege Taiwan. I don't believe we will see any profit share numbers comparable to EK though.
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The sole aim of this survey is to get more people to engage or fill in the survey. As for actually doing anything, past history shows that they will do absolutely nothing. There's nothing b in their current management practice that will show they will do anything else. But if they can get more to fill in the survey then it will look good for their data and show they are engaging more with staff. The worst thing for the managers will be to have even less staff than before fill in the stupid survey. That will send the biggest message of all. A staff that doesn't give a hoot any more!
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Correct. No response is worse than a negative response from the HR point of view, as responding (even angrily) is viewed as the employee still being “engaged”.
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https://m.marketscreener.com/quote/s...41/financials/
The estimated operating margin for 2023 is 9.19% based on 8.1 B profit estimate. ( some analysts upgraded profit est to 8.7).
I believe indeed we will see high profit years, especially with HKIA expansion, and only if Xi doesn't invade or siege Taiwan. I don't believe we will see any profit share numbers comparable to EK though.
The estimated operating margin for 2023 is 9.19% based on 8.1 B profit estimate. ( some analysts upgraded profit est to 8.7).
I believe indeed we will see high profit years, especially with HKIA expansion, and only if Xi doesn't invade or siege Taiwan. I don't believe we will see any profit share numbers comparable to EK though.
The same capacity predictions that have been wildly off-mark through each stage of the non-recovery?
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We all joined cathay as mercenaries. It was always a ****hole company to work for. But they paid well enough, provided well enough benefits and most importantly had a good enough contract to attract us all. They used the contents of the contracts, specifically certain provisions of it to entice us to join. How you could calculate your career-long earnings, how "last in-first out" meant your chances of losing your job in times of strain would be reduced thus your loyalty and longevity rewarded.
.
.
It was a great company to work for when I first joined , there was respect and loyalty that went both ways , sadly that respect and loyalty has been replaced by resentment and indifference
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https://money.cnn.com/quote/forecast/forecast.html?symb=CPCAY
Joblow, there are 49 reasons why your statement of mutual respect back when you joined is wrong. You and everybody else knew what kind of environment Cathay and Hong Kong was when you joined. It was the same beast, just more lucrative.
Vendetta, you said it yourself, it was always a sh. You just hoped it would pay of for yourself, like the rest of us. In my opinion this should prevent us from making moral judgements today, you live by the sword, you might die by the sword..
Last edited by corporal klinger; 22nd May 2023 at 00:39.
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Some of the responses on here are truly comical.
It’s not what you signed up for? CX had a huge amount of goodwill amongst the crew? Morale is low? They’ve lost credibility as an employer? It was a great company to work for? I’d be happy if they just gave me back COS08?
What drugs are you all on?
Did you not witness what management did to the A scalers, the super B scalers, the ‘99 sign or be fired, the 49ers, the Adelaide instructors, the Paris based crew? And that’s just the pilots. Have a chat to old timers from engineering, from ISD, from ground staff. Did you think that your hat and white shirt gave you special privileges? Or because C scale was a lesser package than B scale then your package was safe? The one thing management have been consistent with over the decades has been their treatment of staff and disregard for contracts.
We’ve been in and out of industrial action for 30 years with this archaic management. Contract Compliance. Maximum Safety Strategy. Training Ban. Sick outs. Infinite court cases. Then repeat every 5 years.
Where is this former credibility and goodwill you speak of?
Remember leading up to COS18 you’d been in industrial action for 4 years. In the nearly 3 years since COS18 you’ve done precisely nothing. Yet somehow this is reflective of deteriorating goodwill and morale. Are management aware of this? Are you beating your chest that hard it hurts? Are you whinging at the very highest octave? Are you writing sentences on yammer only using uppercase?
It only takes two members to form a strike motion. A contract compliance motion. A training ban motion. One member to organise a golf WhatsApp group. When you’re asking how we’ve got ourselves into this position and how we’re going to get out of it then there’s no need to look
beyond the bathroom mirror.
You’d be happy if you were still on your old contract? Really? As a collective you voted down an improvement to COS08. Twice. Initially a 7% improvement then a 1% improvement with future adjustments tied to inflation. Since then inflation is up about 20%. So to have kept the same spending power you had in 2016 that you voted down you’d need COS08 plus 20%. And if you’re consistent you’d vote that down again as being not enough to have a quality of life in Hong Kong while saving for a life beyond work.
And you’d probably be right. So be honest with yourselves about where we’ve been, where we want to go, and how we’re going to get there.
We’d need to be on COS08 plus 20% to get us back to what was on the table 7 years ago, and even that would be questionably sufficient in todays environment.
You are only getting there with some serious industrial action including striking.
Are you ready to follow a General Committee that won’t sign its own letters into a strike? If not you’re only tinkering around the periphery of your problems. And chest beating. To be honest I think that’s all most of you are prepared to do.
It’s not what you signed up for? CX had a huge amount of goodwill amongst the crew? Morale is low? They’ve lost credibility as an employer? It was a great company to work for? I’d be happy if they just gave me back COS08?
What drugs are you all on?
Did you not witness what management did to the A scalers, the super B scalers, the ‘99 sign or be fired, the 49ers, the Adelaide instructors, the Paris based crew? And that’s just the pilots. Have a chat to old timers from engineering, from ISD, from ground staff. Did you think that your hat and white shirt gave you special privileges? Or because C scale was a lesser package than B scale then your package was safe? The one thing management have been consistent with over the decades has been their treatment of staff and disregard for contracts.
We’ve been in and out of industrial action for 30 years with this archaic management. Contract Compliance. Maximum Safety Strategy. Training Ban. Sick outs. Infinite court cases. Then repeat every 5 years.
Where is this former credibility and goodwill you speak of?
Remember leading up to COS18 you’d been in industrial action for 4 years. In the nearly 3 years since COS18 you’ve done precisely nothing. Yet somehow this is reflective of deteriorating goodwill and morale. Are management aware of this? Are you beating your chest that hard it hurts? Are you whinging at the very highest octave? Are you writing sentences on yammer only using uppercase?
It only takes two members to form a strike motion. A contract compliance motion. A training ban motion. One member to organise a golf WhatsApp group. When you’re asking how we’ve got ourselves into this position and how we’re going to get out of it then there’s no need to look
beyond the bathroom mirror.
You’d be happy if you were still on your old contract? Really? As a collective you voted down an improvement to COS08. Twice. Initially a 7% improvement then a 1% improvement with future adjustments tied to inflation. Since then inflation is up about 20%. So to have kept the same spending power you had in 2016 that you voted down you’d need COS08 plus 20%. And if you’re consistent you’d vote that down again as being not enough to have a quality of life in Hong Kong while saving for a life beyond work.
And you’d probably be right. So be honest with yourselves about where we’ve been, where we want to go, and how we’re going to get there.
We’d need to be on COS08 plus 20% to get us back to what was on the table 7 years ago, and even that would be questionably sufficient in todays environment.
You are only getting there with some serious industrial action including striking.
Are you ready to follow a General Committee that won’t sign its own letters into a strike? If not you’re only tinkering around the periphery of your problems. And chest beating. To be honest I think that’s all most of you are prepared to do.
Last edited by Progress Wanchai; 22nd May 2023 at 10:27.