320rider,

Are you suggesting that the current cadet programs at airlines could cause a double-dip recession for European countries? Or are you referring to an airline-travel recession? I am not at all sure I understand this part of your post.

Wally.

Things maybe a bit different this summer, crewing levels seem to have been well and truly:mad: up. And with the discussion of this new 'Junior F/O' contract, hopefully EZY have seen the light and are starting to move away from this 'contracting' business.

I will be interested when this new Oxford group are due to start on the line. It must be close to coinciding with the time that all these guys on the summer contract are due to finish.

Not for the first time, there is some significant misinformation on this thread about easyJet employment practices. I am not going to justify some of the shameful pay practices of the last few years at easyJet, but the statements by A320rider and others are simply not true. There is not a single cadet who has been laid off at easyJet after obtaining 1000 hours (or whatever figure is currently being quoted) to make way for more 200 hour people. Assuming the current pay offer is ratified by the voting pilots (and I believe it will be), then most cadets who were laid off in the winter previously will be on permanent contracts of some kind by the end of the year. The minimum starting salary will be just over £30k + sector pay. It is not great, but it is a huge step forward. EasyJet are categorically not laying off people to employ cheaper, less experienced pilots. Boring as the truth is, that is the truth nonetheless.

Wallywumpus,

P2F in aviation is minor, but this system of pay to fly is a gangraine in many areas.
I mean this system is not helping our economic recovery. it 's not only in aviation but in other sectors.

Instead to reform the retirement system across Europe, why not to give paid jobs to people. So we can pay retirements and people can start to spend money, and countries won't have to increase their VAT (like in Greece).

Our government say people get jobs? it' s not totally true, many job are part time, or they pay to work. People get job to survive, they don't get a decent salary to run the system.

This is a socialist farce, and we are near a double recession which I think will start after this summer or before christmas 2010.The trend now is to work for 2 or 3 people(work 55-60 hours/week or more instead of the usual 35-40h) , or pay to work.
In the industry, many are offered 6 or 12 months stage(unpaid of course). These young men and women coming from university are just "stealing" a paid job, and every year, we have thousand of engineers poping out of schools.

Some companies develop new products, and don't have to pay one penny to their inventors. They all think they will get a job after their 6-12 months stage(like these poor pilots who join the P2F schemes). in fact they are simply replaced by another engineer.

Why should they pay an engineer 6000$ a month, when they can get one for free? same thing happen in aviation with their new famous P2F schemes!

The end of the Euro is here.
Like the Tower of Bable, Europe will collapse and USA & China will laugh at us.:E

A320rider, a few P2F people will not change the national econonomies of major European countries. There are no pay to fly people at EZY. bmi on the other hand has them but they are not part of the workforce per say. You show huge ignorance, with various airlines recruitment procedures. Still trolling around pprune then!!?:ugh:

Well basically the 10 got selected yesterday, in the next week and a half the interviews will be conducted and ezy will pick 8 that they want. then by mid july the 8 will start type rating so as to be on line training by mid september.

And as for the first batch earlier this year, they are not on contracts yet, still on the hourly rate with parc.

NSF - there is NOTHING in this "pay" offer that ties the company too actually employing anyone as a second officer. This contract may simply rest on the same dusty shelf that the TRSS and DEP contracts currently reside on.

Interestingly I did not realise that all cadets at EZY even though they are not employed by EZY are getting to vote on this "pay" offer. The company knows that you could dangle a perm contract in front of most of these cadets and you can get them to jump through hoops for the management - and vote through a 1% non back dated hot air filled "pay" offer.

Ask an ex GB pilot about the techniques employed to get them to sign EZY contracts, like, for example, the [I]promise[I] of long sector pay being sorted out as soon as they signed:ugh:

Do we never learn?

Sorry for the thread creep.

ezydriver - you are right that nothing in the deal that ties the company to employing the cadets on the Second Officer scale. However, the deal was agreed with the company for the specific purpose of doing just that and I fully expect that many cadets will be offered the new deal in November as agreed. If that does not happen, there would be massive repurcussions for industrial relations and that is simply not in the company's interest.

Regarding the longer sector pay 'promised' to ex-GB drivers, no one was ever promised that in any document that I am aware of. Phillip Smallwood was very specific about that in all conversations - he made it clear that longer sector pay was not on offer. If you or others believed anything to the contrary you were simply mistaken. I am ex-GB myself (albeit before the takeover) and have no axe whatsoever to grind with the GB guys - nonetheless it is important to know what was actually 'promised' as opposed to whatever people might have been led to believe by well-meaning colleagues. For what it is worth, in my judgement the easyJet takeover is the very best thing that could have happened to GB pilots, given that their erstwhile mates at BA no longer wanted them. Less than a year later GB would have been finished and many, if not all, pilots there out of work. Instead of that, all pilots were taken on in their original position (including Training Captains) and they were given 'seniority' based in some cases on a date prior to the existence of easyJet! The GB guys have been, and continue to be, a huge asset to easyJet. The overhwhelming majority of them have fitted-in well and enjoy life here. They probably work harder than previously, but given the stark alternatives, I would humbly suggest that at this moment in time a permanent job at easyJet is a very desireable commodity. It is undoubtedly true that one or two hate easyJet with a passion, as indeed do a number of our own home-grown folk. To such people, I would respectfully invite them to seek employment elsewhere wherever that wonderful job is - I wish them nothing but success. I would also point out that despite the ups and downs of the command assimilation process, way more GB pilots have been promoted than would ever have been the case under the old GB system. I heard a figure the other day that by the end of the summer easyJet will have had 158 internal promotions (I cannot verify that figure, but believe it to be correct). How many companies in Europe can match that?

No company is perfect, but for all its faults many of the gripes that have really antagonised the pilots have been actively addressed. We still have some way to go, but I cannot think of many better companies to work for right now. There are those out there who have found their promised land, and I wish them well, but for many people easyJet is a very pleasant and secure place to work where you fly brand new Airbuses to a wide variety of destinations every day. I for one am grateful for that opportunity and therefore will continue to work here for the forseeable future.

Perhaps we should avoid creeping back to the GB - EZY business. I think the intent of EZY drivers post (which I'm agreed with) and NSF's post (which I am partly agreed with) is that EZY can sometimes be a good place to work (not right now for many people) but the lessons of history are that senior management are generally liars who can't be trusted.

If companies like Easyjet were recruiting, shouldnt the jobs be advertised correctly.

E.G not just Oxford cadets via a relationship and Easyjet advertising on their websites / publications to meet all of the equal opportunities / employment law regulations in the EU?

In our company we have a policy of advertising internally & externally to comply with the laws of the land. How come the airlines dont always do this.

As for pay to fly schema's or 6 month contracts with little promose of full time employment. Its a difficult issue. Perhaps BALPA should be looking at how these roles are advertised or challenging the legal positions and lobbying with the CAA or courts.

If EZY are really recruiting cadets at the moment to be line training as Norton 2005 states, in September, isn't this rather late in the year, bearing in mind the 'over crewing' stated by management for the winter period?

I would have thought starting in January to be on line by the beginning of May would have been more useful and helped out the shortage this summer - viz the 3 is it, wet leases.

Are these people going to be kept on over the winter or who else is going to have a contrct terminated to bring numbers to what management want for the winter?

Reading about the T n C's here scares the sh*t outta me as my airline in India is gonna have a new CEO by the name of Niel Mills who was apparently your former CFO.

Not looking forward to his tenure here.

I agree with you it's a bit of a funny time to get these guys started on line training but thats how it's going down Im afraid. the guys are now due to start type training next week or week after so by mid september, it will be time for line training. once line training is complete, and this is a guess, they may go onto the deal that the first 20 got a few months back. that is, if we cant fly you, you can do your own thing and we'll give you recurrency training at regular intervals untill next summer. Just remember that all the while you are with parc so you won't get paid untill you fly next summer. Now the first bit of the post about line training from september is fact, the second part about what will happen after line training is just an educated guess. If you wonder how I know whats going on with this, it's because I have ex colleagues who are doing this scheme right now!! O and p.s, you won't have a set base for sure like they tell you. one colleague has been floating from base to base, a week in liverpool, a week in paris, a week in luton, so it looks like this scheme also comes along with a, you go where we need you policy!