We all support you Norwegian Pilots.

Please all: do everything you can to avoid being part of anything that assists the bean counters in breaking this strike.

All Pilot actions are for the benefit of all of us. Management greed and legal manipulation has been very destructive to our chosen careers for the past 20 years.

To all pilots in Norwegian (outside NAS). Be very carefull not to participate in strike braking as you would be black listed in IFALPA and future work would be limited. Bjorn Kjos will use means to break the unions.

berserker,

surprised there, normally the Danes are the first ones to down tools & set up picket lines (look at FR's "experience" ) quite untypical.

Added to say that you've got my full support. Enough is enough!

Full support to the Norwegian pilots ( NAN ) this days!
It's a shame that Danish Air Transport take the opportunity to fly on DY routes now!

Good luck NPU!
Actually the entire pilot community in EU should set the Park Brake to ON!
EASA and the EU politicians need to be told 'nuff's Enough now!!
Just Say No!!

Strikebraking or not?
 

So Norwegian consist of a mother company with pilots hired in daughter company below. Now one of these daughter companies are on strike. Norwegian is now transfering pilots from one daugther to another. The union is claiming this is strikebraking. Norwegian/ Bjørn Kjos says it's not. What do you think? If it is, why?:suspect:

It is because in doing so you bypass the normal "rules". Effectively you put your employees out of the game when it comes to negotiations.

This will become really really ugly.. Simply put Mr. Bjørn Kjos big dream is to be able to compete or beat the lowest production cost out there, meaning for shorthaul it is not enough to beat Easyjet on costs, no he want to beat Ryanair .. It is like an obsession.. Base meeting, after base meeting, up comes the spreadsheet comparison to other carriers.. and one name comes up.. Ryanair, Ryanair, Ryanair.

In his quest to drive costs downward Norwegian has been reorganised, so the company you purchase your ticket with is a "virtual airline" with owned production companies underneath. The Kjos logic now is that if one "unit" is on strike, he can just ask another unit to fly his aircraft.. For negotiations production units can be put up against each other to drive down T & C's.

In short the non-scandinavian based crew will be used to break down T & C's of the original flight crew that helped build this airline.

The only solution is for all flightcrew to stand united. This is probably also the only chance of a turn-around of the contractor policies introduced the last couple of years.

None of the scandi pilots want Norwegian to become a new Ryanair! I am not sure Kjos is aware how pissed off people are.. He probably will never show up again at base meetings, in Scandinavia ;-)

It's pretty simple really. If the union loses this conflict then it's game over for Scandinavian pilot careers. Go to china, save all the earnings for 5 years and invest in stocks. Go home and do something else while you live off of dividends. Anyone even contemplating starting a flying career in Scandinavia would have to be insane if this dam breaks. You will be hired by the hour by a third party, with zero social benefits, no pension, paying your own expenses, flying a gruelling roster that forces you to forfeit any sort of normal life and relationship. You will in essence live to work. I say you deserve better. We all do.

Scandinavian Airlines are doing much the same and the cabin is on strike as a result. Buy another airline and transfer the employees to it with a brand new shiny set of conditions. If this is legal, then collective agreements are all null and void. Worth less than the stationary holding the ink. Why even pretend in that case?

Collective agreements are becoming a thing of the past. Actual employment is becoming a thing of the past. And in all lines of work too I might add. Companies don't hire anyone anymore, they do it via agencies to minimise their responsibilities. Nobody wants to worry about sick leave, parental leave, pensions, vacation. You know, all the silly things that mean living instead of existing. 20-year olds serving coffee sit in their parents house on stand-by hoping to get called out to work via SMS. If you reply within five minutes you get to go to work for a day, congratulations. Any later and the offer has moved on. Like factory workers in 1812 muzzling up to the gates hoping the foreman will point at them that day.

And time and time again we are beaten over the head with the same mantra. Cost cost cost. We have to have zero cost for everything. Any expense and we will all go bankrupt and then you will have no job at all. So we bow our heads and think well yes alright, 15% pay cut is manageable. Then next year, guess what. CEO got away with it so now he wants 20% cuts. Or ELSE. And at the end of that year there's a BIG old gala where the CEO and his merry robbers give each other trophies, medals, diplomas and a nice fat bonus as "leaders of the year" for being such good little boys, conning the lowly serfs who work for them out of their rightful compensation. See, it pays to be in a perpetual state of "bankruptcy". It pays them, and you get to pay. Nice gig on the right side of the fence.

When did we accept, as a society, to roll back the times to 1800 to be "competitive"? Who stands to benefit from such a development? Does is behove us as a species to drive towards this? Or has a small unit of money and power conned the rest of us into fearful surrender? Happy to receive whatever scraps fall off the table, oh thank you sir, oh bless you mam. We think we are prisoners to this reality when we are in fact the guards. We have the keys to unlock all doors and leave yet we consistently choose the fabrication that says fear is the only option. And we consistently make the sort of self-serving and short-sighted decisions that gives us 1 and costs us 2. Well thank god for that, they told me I stood to lose 3. What a victory...

Politicians unfortunately do not care. Primarily because they have already elevated themselves to the point that they are disconnected from normal life. They were allowed to set their own terms, salary, pensions and they quickly decided that they are special people. Unique in every way and well deserving of all the toys they could spy. "Why don't they eat cake" is pretty much what you can hope for from the well-fed ignoramuses of elected offices. Legislation is the only thing that will correct the current abominable treatment of employees and that means politics.

Ultimately this will break society and destroy all the things that previous generations fought for. We took those things for granted and spent our time staring at footie and naked celebrities instead. And here we are. Nobody will have a job, we will all be fighting amongst ourselves for any scrap of income and the great men and women in head office and parliament will drink to each others health all the while pretending to give a flying :mad:

Hear hear.

This race to the bottom has been going on for far too long, but I wonder if it will ever stop.

I'm not an expert on the matter, but the problem such as I see it is not the airlines themselves. There will always be one airline that goes further than the other airlines, within the regulations, or in "grey" areas of regulations within Europe. The other airlines that have unionized pilots, collective agreements, and a normal human benefits package will be the losing party.

The only way I see out of this lunacy, is for the EU to impose stricter regulations as to what airlines can do, how far they can go with contract labor, and how they can shop around Europe for the best place to have every piece of your company.
However, I assume the EU are mostly in the pocket of the airlines in question, and won't budge unless a string of accidents will swing the public opinion to make them change, like in the US.

WORD somethingclever and yes PlanetEarth. Only when Joe Public has lost a few friends or relatives in a couple of fatal crashes will the politicians decide/ feel pressured to do something. They already know.......

Sadly...
 

Or sadly, and probably more realistically, we will have a spate of hull losses, and maybe the general public will remember that what we do isn't always just a walk in the the park...

How many pilots roughly are on strike? On another website it mentions 70, surely there must be a lot more?

Good luck to them, a much needed strike IMO.

Are the conditions of the core pilots that much superior to the contractors for discussion purpose can anyone actually post a known comparison ? I follow they are trying to erode the core pilots conditions but will this make them equal to or less than their counterparts they seek support from? Also,was it core pilots that objected to contractors being DEC core after 2 years or management? Historically Scandinavia pilots have always enjoyed better terms and conditions than their counterparts, is this a levelling of the playing field or are Management excavating it!

There are 70 currently on strike. This will expand to all NAN employees on Wednesday, making the number roughly 650.

Good luck colleagues at Norwegian. You have my best wishes and hope you receive the support from your fellow pilots to stand firm and not be undermined. It's a very important battle you simply must win.

The T&C race to the base coming to an airline near you soon ......

something clever,

Best post I have ever read on pprune. You have summed up the situation very well.

@somethingclever: Great post! Should almost be made a sticky.

Hopefully it won't, but many argue that it has already happened on several occasions, especially in other parts of the world.

Safety management is a lot about being analytical, proactive and more or less chronically worried about trends, signals, leads etc. which might connect to a future accident.

Acting in a cocksure manner about this stuff is far from good airmanship in my opinion. DYEF?

I can recommend a look at safety literature from authors like James Reason, Jens Rasmussen, Barry Turner, Karl Weick, Sidney Dekker and others. Good old common sense also comes to mind.

I can not believe It...