More unrest at ryanair

[scraglad]

FR PRA*S

Good post i need cider,

I know a lot of the FR pilots and I can tell you for nothing,the moral in FR in DUB anyway is cr*p.

All departments of this airline suffers,from check-in to ops to ramp.They even had the cheek to put a deductuion form in the ramp lads wages for marshalling wands!!!


What a company.

[pp1]

Riverboat in your first post on this thread you inferred that it was the pilots who were seeking a change in their contract. This is not the case; it is MOL that is forcing a grossly unfair change on his pilot’s terms of employment.

I hope this latest episode will be the final piece of evidence needed for those pilots who have resisted joining the union to finally realise that without a show of collective strength they will continue to see their terms and conditions sent spiralling down the plughole.

The message has never been clearer……JOIN THE UNION AND FIGHT THE LITTLE FECKER!

[i_need_cider]

Thanks scraglad. The rampers paying for the marshalling wands is a joke. But the punchline to the joke is if they lose or misplace the wands which they pay for themselves therefore belong to them, they will be DISCIPLINED ACCORDINGLY.

[411A]

Let us presume for the moment that FR wants to grow into larger aircraft, and leave the 737's aside altogether.

So, they decide on 767's and offer the alternative to pilots...either pay for your rating, or we hire from outside, as there seem to be plenty of folks available, from FR's perspective of course...true or not.

Now, what do you do?
Pay for your conversion, or go elsewhere?

FR has no legal obligation to its pilots to pay for the conversion, and indeed hiring from outside is always presumed to be cheaper...which it most certainly nearly always is.

So, now substitute 767's for 737-700/800/900's and you have more or less the same situation, except of course it may well be a bit more difficult (maybe nearly impossible) to find currently rated pilots.

An interesting scenario...pay up, or quit.
Oh yes, and NO union, thank you very much.

Suspect MOL may well get away with this, unless he is run over by a cement truck.

And, quite frankly, I think I would do the same, considering some of the aggressive comments listed here.

Pay up...or goodbye.
Simply because I could, under Irish employment law, as it presumably stands.

[cactusbusdrvr]

To those who feel that Ryan pilots need to pay for their new types- Training is a cost of doing business. That is a necessary part of aviation. If you buy new equipment, presumably because they are more efficient and/or have a greater capacity then you do so because it makes you potentially more profitable. You then have to have crews to fly them;planes don't do well on their own (no matter how much management and nerd engineers would like to think so). Why on earth would you take your most experienced crews and toss them on the street unless you were trying to bust a union? The more experienced the crew, the less training costs will be for the conversion.

Those that would even consider paying for training, especially in the normal course of business are, to put it mildly, fools. If the company was paying for you to learn to fly then you might have a case for a training bond. But this isn't even close. This is a requirement for FR due to a change in fleet and, as such, has been factored into their budget. If these are new aircraft then Boeing is even paying for a certain number of crews per aircraft to be trained. ZERO COST to the company.

Yeah if it looks like dog sh## and smells like dog sh## then I don't have to taste it to know that it is dog sh##, particularly if the dog is standing there, panting.

[MOR]

The sad thing about all this is that it is happening - as 411A says - because it can.

This is the way aviation is going, MOL is just the pioneer of these sorts of tactics.

It used to be that pilots were treated like senior execs. The main reason being, apart from their skill, that any one of them could seriously damage an airline by allowing a single lapse in professionalism. Many airlines have gone broke after a single crash.

Treating pilots like this will eventually lower the standards of the profession, and I personally think that it is only a matter of time before a Ryanair pilot, preoccupied with MOL's latest antics, has an accident. That is the inevitable result of raising the stress level in your pilot workforce.

Having said that, everybody has the right to vote with their feet. Ryanair pilots need to either grow some collective courage and take the company on, or accept their lot and quit grumbling.

[A-3TWENTY]

IRA

Listen...if you don`t join to a union and work together to invert this situation you all may be sure that things will be even worst.

Do you know how to make new copilots join the unions???

Every leg on a day flight you ask them if they have already joined the union.
If he says no.....he doen`t fly.

If you all do that ,for sure it will work.It did work in my last company.

I don`t know if people is together at Ryanair,but consider a strike mainly to get your respect back.

Remember:Neither you are so weak as you think you are ,nor they are so strong as you think they are.

I wish you good luck,despite I think your situation is very complicated

[pprecious]

A-3Twenty

Every leg on a day flight you ask them if they have already joined the union.
If he says no..... he don't fly

Is that really a valid reason for a Captain to replace an F/O? With that method you are replacing a bullying management with a bullying captain.... Sure fire way to improve moral and CRM.

Surely union membership is a matter of personal choice, or do you want to go back to the good old days of closed shops?

[smartarse]

Yes sir! I vote for closed shops, bring back Sunday and Wednesday afternoons!!

[PaxmanwithInfo]

Constitutional Challenge and co-operation - A call to Arms

You know that the pilots in question earn more than 130K by all accounts - poor down-trodden souls?

The personal mud-slinging is rather distateful - "tinker" et cetera. Perhaps you would feel more gratified if you hit someone with a placard?

Sometimes I feel sorry for those who do not know what they do.

The other big majors DELL, Microsoft whoever, based in Ireland will not be happy with the implication of binding findings from the Labour Court - how is that constitutional?

In my view business will launch an attack - a concerted and serious attack. They have to.

Saying that a constitutional challenge is the last resort of a scoundrel is simply misleading and foolhardy.

Watch this space.

PaxmanwithInfo

[signeti]

"You know that the pilots in question earn more than 130K by all accounts - poor down-trodden souls"

is that a fact paxman???
and where did u come by those figures ????
mol wants people to believe that everyone in ryanair is on the absolute max money possible ,
if you could find 10 non management people on that money in ryanair i'd say well done and what about all the new F/o's on crap money , do u think they take home 130K ???

get a brain paxman

[pp1]

MOL expects his pilots to be a walkover, as in the past they always have been. It is fair to say this is in some part due to the fear factor he manages to instil in his employees, but every pilot who fails to join the union is weakening the position of the whole pilot community.

For Christ sake, stand up for yourselves and your proffesion.

[minuteman]

METEOR

It's worth pointing out that anyone who does a little research into the legislation being employed [sic] by IALPA/IMPACT, will already discover rulings / decisions taken on the basis of this Act.

One actually involves a company owned by...wait for it...a US multinational!

Doesn't the argument on "constitutionality" handily deflect any questions on whether one intends or is able to comply with said legislation?

Best of luck to all the FR pilots. Keep on sticking together!

(edited for speling)

[Norman Stanley Fletcher]

I keep thinking of re-joining BALPA when I hear of what is going on in the industry. And then I read comments from people like A-3TWENTY who are just yobs straight from the 70s here in the UK. If I was management and found that an FO had been denied flying rights from a captain because he was not in the union - the captain would be sacked and out the door that afternoon.

Therein lies my dilemna - do I unwittingly support the likes of MOL by not joining the union or do I join and have to put up with the outrageous and totally unacceptable face of union ignorance as exemplified by A-3TWENTY? What a terrible choice!

[scraglad]

minuteman,

Your saying to the pilots of fr to "stick together", i agree but;


I posted a title called "paying for t/r" and basically i urged all pilots to not pay for their t/r. 90% of the reply's said if its the difference between a flying job,they would pay for it.
If the fr pilots stand up to MOL and his hench men,they are out the door and these 90% WILL pay.


It all boil's down to the refusal of paying for t/r. If we all stand together and refuse,just maybe we might get somewhere.

[batty]

£130K pa excellent, I best go into the office and with a big wheelbarrow for all the pay I have missed in the last few years......

Thanks for the tip Paxman

[minuteman]

scraglad, If I am correct (which can be quite a rarity), your topic was concerned with pilots willing to pay for an initial type rating, or an initial job with an airline. There have been part-sponsorships, reduced initial payscales and training bonds for "newhires" around for a long time.

What this issue is about is a number of pilots, already employed by the company, being asked to pay for a training course, and being bonded - in extremely vague terms - to the company for the privilege of paying for your training course, and being asked to accept a change in their terms and conditions and above all, be thankful for this golden opportunity (!)

Think about it, if one worked in an office and a new computer system is to be installed for use by the employees, is it reasonable to expect the employees to pay for the required training course just so they get to keep their job? Or is it reasonable to invest in those same employees so that they become more productive as a result of their training and new equipment, driving efficiencies etc etc?

Is the FR scenario considered normal industry practice?

Back to the real issue: IALPA/IMPACT have not made a claim on behalf of FR pilots. There is no threat of industrial action. Why is MOL so reluctant to issue the terms and conditions to all of his pilots (if they are so good?)

Whatever happens, the best plan is for the FR pilots to stay united.

[pprecious]

In the IT / Telecomms world bonding was considered for some time, due to the high numbers of staff receiving expensive vendor training courses and then leaving to go freelance.

There was a question at the time whether this was legal acording to European employment law, however the majors got around it by creating anti-poaching agreements between each other and the vendors, thus safeguarding their 'investment'

Not being directly involved in aviation I can't comment on the rights and wrongs of FR's policy, however it would seem to mirror what's going on in other, non-aviation, related industries.

[butpau]

Yesterday there was another, very balanced article in the Irish Times devoted to this matter which is far too long to reprint and there is no point adding a link as an account is required to read it (and since a lot of you people are up in arms over having to pay for a coffee then I suspect a subscription to the said news paper would be out of the question!).
It boils down effectively to FR’s utter fear of what an organised union could do to it business, and it has an abundance of recent history to fall back on to support its fears. Unions are very prone to been taken over by megalomaniacs with hidden agendas geared ultimately towards their own self interest - (the name Willy from air fungus mean anything to you and didn’t he do well for himself ). Anyone who tries to tell me that union leadership is made up of a bunch of altruistic fellows with exclusively the interests of its members at heart are kidding themselves. Their ‘raison de etre’ is to squeeze the best deal possible without regard to the long term well being of the business and leaqst anyone forget, FR is a business. Where were the senior pilots when the Ryan family had to mortgage everything it owned to keep the business flying – busily feathering their own nest, that’s where. The union needs to demonstrate to the management that it has the long term best interests of the company at heart and not just the pilots. But no, the senior pilots, and its always the senior pilots cause there all right jack and screw the rest, think they have a God given right to fly and by the way, we also make the rules. Well maybe they have, but not with FR – try the hoity toity, jolly hockey sticks handle bar moustached brigade of BA et al if thats what your after. This group, though they cant see it, have helped create an environment that MOL can now exploit to his advantage every single time that this issue comes up. It’s a basic concept of the free market and its called supply and demand. The senior pilots throughout this industry have helped create the environment where hundreds of Wannabees have to, and are prepared to, pay for their own training and put themselves on the market for the highest, or in FR’s case, the lowest bidder. The senior pilots over the years allowed this to happen cause they turned the industry into a closed shop and made it so difficult for people to get in that the inevitable happened – JAR. While they were busy running out of height adjustment in their cockpit caused by the ever increasing thickness of the fat wallets they were sitting on, armies of guys an gals were forking out upwards of 80K of their own dosh to put themselves through training and coming out the other side more than competent to fly an aircraft. So the prospect of having to pay for a Type is second nature. Now they are hungry to work and MOL must think its Christmas every day and you guys helped create it.
By the way, just in case some of you think you can comfort yourselves in the knowledge that I'm a screeming MOL fan well I'm not. (The same thing is going on in many other LCC's but they dont have an excentric media hogging self publisist as a CEO). I am however a fan of what he has created and achieved.

[woodpecker]

"Gin and Tonic please."

"That will be £4.50."

"Ice and lemon?"

"It's six in the evening, they put the ice on the first flight of the day and it's gone/melted by 10am. The Lemon doesn't melt but it's all gone!"

That's the way they look after the pax. The pilots no better!