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Easyjet already on Strike

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Easyjet already on Strike

Old 4th Dec 2009, 09:50
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Easyjet already on Strike

Berlin - A two-hour strike Thursday by Easyjet flight deck and cabin staff at Berlin's Schoenefeld Airport disrupted flights to Rome, London and other European cities, airport staff said.
The German staff are demanding that the company recognize a workers' council incorporated under German law. British-based Easyjet refuses to deal the panel representing 300 Germans, according to the ver.di trade union.
Easyjet criticized the protest, saying it was in talks on the subject and would be offering its staff German employment contracts soon. Some 50 staff took part in the stoppage, which ended at 9 am Central European time (0800 GMT).


Read more: Berlin flights to Rome and other cities hit by Easyjet strike - Monsters and Critics

Last edited by f/spninx; 4th Dec 2009 at 09:52. Reason: Correction
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Old 4th Dec 2009, 11:20
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Nice backbone from easy pilots and cabin crew. Well done!
Take note fr pilots.
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Old 4th Dec 2009, 11:37
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"Vive le revolution" , would like to see it catching on, but something tells me it won't.
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Old 4th Dec 2009, 12:34
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I thought that within the EU any contract form ant Member state should be recognised. i.e. if you work in Germany for A British company you don't need German Employment Law. Haven't we been round this with FR and the French
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Old 4th Dec 2009, 16:51
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can't believe you said that

How can you guys say "pilots shouldn't strike" and things like pilots earn enough money. It is about basic stuff here. Of course we wouldn't starve with 5000€ a month or whatever. But the airlines, even those with a little self-esteem like LH and EZY are taking advantage of this ever-so terrible economic crisis (where planes are still full and the company is making profit, share price at 3-year-high) to destroy our T&Cs and our future as professionals. Imagine, for more than a year we are fighting about bread rolls in our crew-food and the latest cost-cutting measure: removal of salt and pepper; isn't that ridiculous?! They are restricting our leave (can only bid for 5 days in a row), now offering contracts where, when you leave homebase to get command somewhere else and then come back, you will be offered entry-level salary like a 200-hour-cadet despite you years in service and thousands of hours of experience. Experience is neither valued nor paid for.
This must stop. If even proper airlines do this now, how do you think smaller outfits will look like in 5-10 years.
"...shouldnt strike." The opposite. We have waiting too long.
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Old 4th Dec 2009, 17:01
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In a similar vein, as a result of some unsavoury ops management behaviour, 90% of EZY ops and crewing staff have signed up with Unite in the past couple of months. What a great reflection on the inept bullying tactics of operations management.
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Old 4th Dec 2009, 21:09
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Sehr gut

Sehr gut

actions speak louder than words
(Bedford boys take note)
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Old 5th Dec 2009, 05:58
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From a recent interview from Gordon Bethune, who turned Contentinal Airlines around:

"Do you know that Frank Lorenzo and Texas Air (parent of Continental) had the cheapest fares---tore up all the labor contracts, tore up all the airplane contracts, had the lowest cost product in the industry---absolutely the lowest? What happened? They went bankrupt again in 1990. It ain't all about the low cost.

Let's say that you would reduce the cost of pizza by doing something smart like taking the cheese off? How many pizzas are you going to sell? Can you make a pizza so cheap that nobody will eat it? Can you make an airline so cheap nobody will fly it? We did it. Still went bankrupt! That's right! Came out in 1993 and almost went bankrupt again in 1995.

Why is that? Lowest costs but still a ****ty company, still a ****ty product, crummy morale. That's not the kind of airline you want to fly.

We at the same time needed to be on-time because we needed a good product. And we needed to treat our people well. But the marketplace will decide what good is.


At the moment eJ is exploring the recipe for the pizza no one, most of all their staff, want to eat
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Old 5th Dec 2009, 07:10
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Oleo, that post is bang on. Easyjet managers are running the company into the ground by cutting costs to the bone and alienating all their staff in the process.

The only people that are making money out of Easyjet are the managers who had set their bonus criteria so low this year that they would have made money even if the company had made a loss.

They are playing Russian Roulette with rostering "flexibility", not to mention increasing numbers of inexperienced contract FOs and the pay to fly cadets earlier this year.

Easyjet managers are doing their best to line up all the holes in that lump of Swiss cheese.
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Old 5th Dec 2009, 10:40
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Well done. It is about time. I wish this would spread a bit, to other countries and operators around europe.
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Old 5th Dec 2009, 11:31
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"...bonus criteria so low this year that they would have made money even if the company had made a loss..."

Errrrmmmm, I think you've missed something. The industry is in a terrible state. I don't know about EasyJet's accounts so I can't be specific, but for many airlines the best they can possibly hope for is minimising loss. Management bonuses are intended to reward the management for performing well. If their best possible performance still results in a loss then bonuses despite making a loss would be entirely reasonable.

Argue if you will against bonuses, a reasoned case can be made. Make a case if you can that EasyJet should be in profit so a loss is down to poor management. Make another case that management is poor and should not be rewarded. Don't just assume that a loss should mean existing bonuses should not be triggered.
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Old 5th Dec 2009, 12:44
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With respect 12 Watt Tim: you know not of what you speak.

Do a quick search of the Financial Times and find the article about eJ panicking and backing the wrong horse on fuel hedging last year. This changing our potential £384m profit to a puney £54m profit.

Doing nothing would have better than this.

Econ 101: Commodity prices fall in a recession.

Fuel Hedging for Airlines 101: thou shalt hedge at the bottom of the market, not the top.

Management 101: if you don't know what you are doing leave it alone or find someone who does................

d'Oh!! Our managers have snatched defeat (£54m profit) from the jaws of victory (a record £384 profit).

I believe in incentivising everyone, but human nature is for these guys to be feathering their own short-term nests. eJ management are doing this with much handwringing and brow beating of their staff whom they pretend to value.

They have dressed up a lousey million-quid-a-week profit for us working our ar$ses off flying around 160 aircraft as something worthy of a bonus.

Funny how for them this is a success, to be rewarded; but when it comes to dealing with their staff, it is it a defeat, and staff are rewarded by relentlessly deteriorating conditions and ulimatums perennially making us out to be the enemy.

This management bonus-culture is a cancer that has crept up exponentially to become many multiples of average employee compensation. And whaddaya know?! it is vigorously defended and justified by the recipients. Dracula and his mates are in charge of the blood bank. SLLUUURRRPPP

I am by no means a socialist, but to value your own contribution in obscene multiples of the guy/gal at the workface is to be sinking your pointy teeth into the necks of those in your care. (Very old fashioned concept to care for your employees - ref Southwest and Netjets for good current examples).

Then use lies, damn lies and statistics to justify your greed.

I do my job to the very best of my ability and get my agreed reward each month. I don't get a bonus if I manage to not crash the aircraft.

I don't think what these guys do is rocket science. Is their compensation commeasurate? Off topic, I wonder how much Staff Sergeant Olaf Sean George Schmid was paid when he died defusing a bomb in Afganistan for his country.

They know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. One of their greatest skills is hoodwinking us that they are worth the £............

Last edited by Oleo; 6th Dec 2009 at 02:45.
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Old 5th Dec 2009, 13:21
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Thumbs up

Excellently spoken Oleo!
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Old 5th Dec 2009, 16:12
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Oleo,
How often your management is teaching you how to fly aircraft?
I believe managment deserves no pilots teaching them to hedge fuel or any other things pilots have no clue about.
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Old 5th Dec 2009, 20:07
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Cargo one why is it that Airlines insist we have a University degree and then feed us drivel a 5 year old wouldn't buy...
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Old 5th Dec 2009, 20:14
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Hey cargo,

Alot of us pointy end guys werent' always drivers. You'd be suprised how many of us have work experience and education in other fields...such as economics and business. Just cause we fly aircraft doesn't mean we aren't qualified and knowledgeable about other things.
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Old 8th Dec 2009, 07:47
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Yeah, it has always baffled me how so many airlines balls up their fuel hedging.

I guess they haven't got the right people who really understand time series analysis of the financial markets and how they fractally evolve.

But this kind of thing from high management never surprises me. I once had a debate with the CEO of a multi billion pound hedge fund (owned by someone who is in the Fin Times top 20 rich list) who didn't understand what "Fiat" money meant and was dubious of technical price analysis of financial markets. How do so many of these mediocre people get to these positions?

Also, the large Investment banks and their MBA graduates showed how mediocre management can make a real hash of things. Not understanding risk and thinking they can calcualte probabilities when they can't. In an in direct way, the fiasco that they caused, starting back in 2007, is a major contributing factor to why the aviation industry is now in such a poor state.
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Old 8th Dec 2009, 08:26
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juniour jetset

If you think everyone is stupid why don't you go and play on crude oil futures, if you know exactly what's going to happen you will be a billionaire in less than half a year.

And oh, by the way, if market would be following what technical analysis predicts, there will be no such thing as fuel hedging or any other futures because it is all about bets.

There is important difference between people actually taking management decisions and monday morning quarterbacks...
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Old 8th Dec 2009, 08:37
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Fuel hedges

I agree with CargoOne.

Guessing the fuel price is like guessing your track miles to some chaotic airport and making a subsequent decent planning.

If you gamble on a shortcut and you deliberately go below profile, then you might get rewarded or you might get screwed.

It's not easy to predict the price of oil (or any other asset or commodity) in these volatile markets for any management. Even major banks and hedge funds get it wrong occasionally.

p.s. the banking fiasco didn't start in 2007, but it started to unwind in 2007. The foundations for this recession were laid many years before that during the low interest rate years that followed the dot.com bubble.
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Old 8th Dec 2009, 09:53
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CargoOne - Nowhere did I mention that everyone is stupid, I'm not that arrogant. All I was pointing out is that so many in management don't understand big parts of the puzzle that they play with. How do you know that I don't play the crude oil futures? Yes, I am a futures trader but not involved in the energies directly.

Agree with your rant on technical analysis though. A wide subject with many different techniques and twice as many opinions. By no means the holy grail to predicitng prices. Also agreed, its all about bets- it's just that there seems to be a lot of bad betting going on!

Guessing the fuel price is like guessing your track miles to some chaotic airport and making a subsequent decent planning. Yes, price prediciton is difficult. It's not that dis-similar to weather forcasting where really good practioners do a good job the majority of the time,as they did with Hurricane Katrina advice. Unfortunately it was the management who ballsed up with the plan.

If you gamble on a shortcut and you deliberately go below profile, then you might get rewarded or you might get screwed. It's not easy to predict the price of oil (or any other asset or commodity) in these volatile markets for any management. Even major banks and hedge funds get it wrong occasionally. - actually they get it wrong alot of the time! That is why the banking system almost failed. So many of their models are based on false assumptions and phoney statistical thinking. Most of these people still believe in simple bell curves when it comes to financial markets

p.s. the banking fiasco didn't start in 2007, but it started to unwind in 2007. The foundations for this recession were laid many years before that during the low interest rate years that followed the dot.com bubble. You could even go as far back as when Mr Alan Greenspan was given the helm - but I don't want to get into an arguement on Economic History

Last edited by juniour jetset; 8th Dec 2009 at 10:03.
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