Industrial action!
 

It appears the drums are beating amongst the troops at Easy for industrial action over the latest from the inept pilot management team.

When reality sinks in, has any pilot group ever really gone on strike?

There has been at individual airlines, at least. Northwest Airlines springs to mind and I think Air France had one too. Bound to have been others

I don't know of any Airline Pilot that wishes for a strike. However, when a company pushes the pilot group into a corner it becomes a 'make or break' for that pilot group. Bend over now and the company will have the means to lower T&C's continually. Consequently the pilot group has little choice but to gather support and fight any unilateral changes to T&C's.

In Easyjet, the way this latest communication was released and what it proposes has been enough to see the Pilots pull together, long time non members of the union are rejoining and the levels were pretty high before hand. It saddens me personally that this is the way we have to work but that is what, FATCAT SHORT TERM managers who will be gone in a matter of months, want.

Try opening your eyes and seeing the state of the industry! Makes as much sense as Vauxhall workers striking for more pay! Companies are hanging on watching any surpluses fast disappearing. Services are being withdrawn and consolidated. Good luck if you think IR will get you anywhere, but most airlines are at the stage of 'hanging onto current pay? That would be brilliant!' rather than 'more money/better TCs!'. Pay cuts are almost upon us, especially if we go into deflation.

Hey Rainboe, seems to me that it is fair to judge any strike only after you know the reason for it. Do you ? (I don't)

Striking helps no-one. However, if people feel forced into it and normal negotiations fail, then it is the final resort.

I do hope it doesn't come to that though.

I have no idea what the issues at EZY are, but I doubt it is anything minor.

and to be fair...anyone who's based in KWI mouthing off about IR issues in Easy is probably a correspondent from Troll central!! :p:p:p

Well said golfyankeesierra. It's a bit pointless someone making comment and judgement without having a clue what this is about.

This is not about asking for increased pay, better T+Cs, etc.

This is about fighting to halt a managerial decision to reduce our T+Cs. Deciding to remove (refresh!) crew food which has already been paid for out of our previously reduced salary, removing tea and coffee for God's sake!, and reducing crew water!! (Health and safety issues there at the very least!) This is about stopping the use of contract captains, while at the same time telling our SFOs in the command hold pool that there are no positions for them.

It's alright trying to appear high and mighty and condescending about this, but it wasn't too long ago that BA pilots were willing to strike to protect their T+Cs over the Open Skies issue. There are obviously a lot more details to this than I have posted here, but suffice to say this is not about asking for payrises (unlike AH and JC awarding themselves 10% and 20% payrises in recent days!)

Northwest pilots did go on strike in '98 for two weeks and ended up with an improved contract. In their earlier years they were known as Cobra Airlines; strike at anything.

Fight Back! - October 1998 - Pilots Win First Round at Northwest Airlines

For those of us old enough BOAC went on strike I think in the 1960s.

But before they went on strike they had "restriction of cooperation" (=working to rule), like no fly with any defects, no discretion and full procedural approaches everywhere to mention a few things.

Pilot Strikes
 

Pilots certainly have gone on strike. In Australia in the late 1980's the domestic RPT pilots went on strike. PM Bob Hawke put the RAAF C130's into public service and famously described the pilots as "Nothing but glorified bus drivers". Nobody but overseas airlines snapping up the striking pilots won out of the deal.

Try Eastern Airlines, the pilots went on strke and the airline went out of business.

Showed them by God.

For the best part of thirty years now the mantra has been 'Strikes help no one, achieve nothing and are a waste of time and effort. Strikers are biting the hand that feeds them & thus they are a bunch of Marxist / Anarchist hooligans'.

In the same time terms and conditions in most industries have been eroded, jobs are out sourced to the cheapest locations and the big bosses pay has sky rocketed.

It is about time there was a reassessment of this condition and if the staff at a company feel that their concerns are not being addressed then taking industrial action may be the only available solution. It is not a decision workers take lightly.

A source from the inside tells me that the unrest is due to management degrading T&C's (taking away water, and reducing crew food, which some pilots took a paycut to keep), and something relating to contract captains.

The part I found interesting is that the management recently awarded themselves a payrise that would have easily paid for crew water and food for 2+ years!

Despicable! My sympathy to you, and I wish you every success!

Strikes are first and foremost a management failure. Keeping your workforce working, if not always deliriously happy, is far more important than executive pay rises.

And whatever grade of workforce you're in dispute with, the one which reflects least well on management is a cockpit-crew dispute. If you can't manage an airline without ripping off your cockpit crew, then you can't manage at all.

I do not believe there has been any formal mention of a strike by BALPA however given the current level of resentment against management it would be no great surprise. Following a winter of what seemed to be productive negotiation, some einstein seems to have decreed from on high that its not enough so they're gonna do a 'smash n grab' on conditions. Given that those on the AMB have yet again awarded themselves handsome payrises this year and still can't settle their differences with Stavros the whole idea isn't going down too well with the troops.
This isn't about a few teabags. This has been simmering for months. It began with a full scale assault on rostering which still seems ongoing, then we have part-time contracts for new captains, removal of uniform allowances, loss of disruption pay, possible contract crews, removal of crew food provisions, gb integration issues. The esteemed leaders have opened up just about every old wound in a single email - so you can imagine the tone of that email and just in time for summer too. Mix that in with roster optimisation that positions crews between 2 uk airports via central europe and you can see the sort of summer that lies ahead in the world of orange.
Nobody wants a strike but a certain influential cloggy wants to break BALPA and unlock the key to the Ryanair airbus division. That, along with his other ideas (of which there are few) is ill-conceived at best.

When I worked for a Very Big Company with a Significant Logo I was often told cost cutting measures and various management decisions that negatively effected staff were to increase shareholder value. I pointed out once that I too was a shareholder and that I wished to see a balance between profit and social responsibility which in my humble opinion would be for the long term benefit of the company and it's customers. I quickly realised that I wasn't a big enough shareholder to harbour such opinions.

These geniuses never went on strike. AFAP persuaded them to resign en masse. They fell for it hook, line and sinker.

See: The Australian Pilots Dispute of 1989 by Alex Paterson

Note that the incident is generously described as a 'dispute', not a 'strike'.

I've been on strike, they haven't. Don't let them BS you on this issue. A sad day for eveyone, but they were never on strike.

Pilots on strike?
 

SABENA just before they went under

Rescue
 

Just confirms the industry nick name "Such A Bloody Experience Never Again":ugh::E