Storm clouds gather
 

Prepare for more gloom this week as the pilots decide their response to several BA management breaches of their agreement.

They say we are not short of pilots but management are prepared to meet pilots in person on arrival and order them in to work for the following day. One individual has had this happen to him twice in a row.

Don't forget, if you refuse you end up on a disciplinary. Thieving bar stewards. :mad:

NNOOOOOO. they were INNOCCENT. (Re Enron). LOL.
Wish I was innocent with 65m USD in the bank.
What has the capitalist world come to?

Various newspaper items recently based around reports that 'the combined pension deficits of the FTSE100 companies have halved in the last 6 months.'

Any ideas as to how BA's has (according to the management) doubled in the last year?

As overstress says, some nice chickens coming home to roost as we speak.

Some nice actions by the Company at the moment. I particularly like the one about expanding the flying program, then denying pilot's leave so you don't need to pay them the overtime that would otherwise result.

Still, at least the 100s of £1000s of management bonuses will be safe.

BA's has not doubled 52049er: FT.com "BA’s pre-tax pension liability under accounting rules, for all schemes in deficit, increased from £2.19bn to £2.29bn in the year to the end of March and the accounting deficit in the main fund, the New Airways Pension Scheme, rose by £101m to £2.1bn."

Matey, I understand perfectly. Do you?

Also: "Following changes in pension legislation, scheme trustees are responsible for setting the assumptions used in the actuarial valuation process, and Mr Maynard warned Naps members, that the trustees would need to be more cautious than they had been three years ago at the time of the last valuation."

Roger Maynard appears to be your man to ask about what "assumption" changes have occurred.

Sorry old chap. Seem to be missing your point. Still, the devil is in the detail.

Is it true that an actuary is a person who wanted to be an accountant but lacked the personality?

Generally said to be for those who find accountancy too exciting

Quite right! Sadly, I lacked the personality to be an actuary :{

Maybe BA could FORCE DRAFT a decent actuary and sort out what is really going on behind the scenes ????

The Scheme Actuary is appointed by the trustees of the scheme, as are all other scheme advisers: legal and investment. The Scheme Actuary has no responsibility to the company.

The company has its own advisers.

Spoilt Babies
 

What a load of babies, whinging & whinning I am sure that plenty of people would love to have a similar job with all the perks that come with it, you chaps don,t know when your well off.
Strike & you will kill the Golden Goose & there will be no pensions & no jobs.

Don't know how much you know about the airline business J.Don.

Pilots can't chop & change jobs as easily as some.

Presumably you think that it's OK for an employer to change something as major as a pension scheme at the drop of a hat to ensure that its managers continue to get fat bonuses?

Otherwise what is your point?

Your posting is incorrect anyway as a pension scheme stays intact even if the company goes. There is no 'golden goose', unless you're a BA senior manager.

Quote:
Pilots can't chop & change jobs as easily as some.

That is soley due to the seniority lists which:
1. Are due to the pilots themselves. I'm sure most airline managers would like to rip them up. :ugh:
2. Seniority lists are, at least in the UK, are open to a challenge in the courts given the new age discrimination laws - i.e. you cannot sack your youngest employees when you are downsizing, just in the same way you cannot sack more women pilots as men pilots, or more Asian pilots than African pilots (provided you know this information). The laws were brought in to protect older employees but the reverse is also true.:=

Overstress,

I think you will find that a pension scheme in serious deficit will definately not stay intact if the company goes.

Not suggesting for a minute that you shouldn't fight for what you were promised, just offering a reality check that the stakes are very high indeed for those not yet drawing their pension.

True, which is why I and most of my colleagues will do whatever we can to ensure we receive what was promised.

BA is one of the world's most profitable airlines and the management seem not to realise that loyal, motivated pilots are essential to that.

Essential???

MMMmmm??

Why?

4468 Because operating out of Heathrow on a daily basis means the operation would grind to a halt if it wasn't for the goodwill of the pilots. It would now seem that we have shot ourselves in the foot though, as it would now appear that this "going the extra mile" and working beyond our contractual agreements now form part of "custom and practice" and that if the pilots now try and work to their contractual limits, we will be in breach of contract.

going the extra mile,motivated pilots,mmm words :D
c'mon you paper tigers put your money where your mouth is strike
:ok:

oh yeah ww in times couple of months ago was confident the pilots will not go on strike, i am begining to belive him

There are loads of jobs going at Ryan Air..... where would you like to start the queue?

Technically, seniority is nothing to do with age. Last in first out is a well known and accepted way of dealing with forced redundancy.

A 27 year old pilot could have 6 years seniority and will not be sacked at the expense of a 50 year old pilot who only joined 5 years ago.

Two completely different things.

BA Pension .
 

I joined the scheme when I was 18. At that time you just enrolled.You would have been daft to ask why.
It was a damn good scheme and rightly so, as has proved later.
The only choice now is "strike or accept this sort of scheme is a thing to be diluted. Not acceptable.
We are successful airline, our CEO will gamble with this. Let him.
B73

Usual mishmash of BA pilot-haters out there, it would seem. I loved the one about motivated pilots being "unnecessary", could have been posted by a BA manager himself!

"Of course motivation is unnecessary we'll just roster them till they drop, then use the Attendance Management Process to fire them!"

BA is looking at a very motivated pilot force - motivated to strike if a pension deal that is in reality just a massive pay cut in thin disguise is imposed by a management "team" who line their pockets incessantly and blatantly whilst robbing ours.

Given the final salary nature of the scheme, the accrued rights mean less to people than you might think, such that threats of; "you'll lose everything so you'd better just be good little elves and go back to the mine and keep breaking rocks", mean a lot less than you might think.

The sheer greed and effrontery of the current flight ops senior managers adds fuel to the fire - we have never been "managed" by such charlatans as these before. They are trawling for a fight and are going to get one.

According to a very senior manager overheard at a party:

"We'd better sort out this pension issue soon as we're running out of places to hide the money...."

Allegedly.

I'm sure there's no truth in the rumour that BA is paying down aircraft mortgage debt as fast as possible...

Agree on the technicality, but last in first out does not apply unless there is an age spread in line with the remaining workforce. As soon as seniority lists are tested in court you can say goodbye to it being used in redudancy or as a promotion tool. There is a status quo at the moment as it is not in the interests of the pilots and also not in the interest of most airlines to upset the workforce. Ask any employement lawyer and they will say the same for LIFO as for seniority lists.
Fact reamins the seniority lists protects most pilots from market forces, unlike almost any other profession.

protects airlines from market forces too! ;)

Spoilt Babies MK II
 

Just ask the employee,s of some of the firms that have gone out of business in the past few years how safe their pensions were, the answer would be not safe at all.
Regarding my knowledge of the airline business I have worked for BEA & BA for over thirty years & watched the flight crew,s change from WW II professionals to just ordinary workers out to get all they can screw out of management
I don,t blame them, what is annoying they think that they are indispensable, remember the American Air Traffic Controllers or the British miners they had big ideas & caught a cold.

Well J.Don i hope you enjoyed your many years of flying during the "golden years" how many hours per year were you flying back then? i bet wasn't circa 900hrs as it is now. Oh and i trust you are/will be enjoying your nice big cryistalised APS pension.
Regarding you comment about ordinary workers i find that absurd and borderline offensive; i think you will find that it's the other way around. I assume that you are now retired as the present outfit is a far cry what it was in the seventies.

indeed - no, just retirement plans, J.Don.

3Greens - I don't think he says he was a pilot - just another member of the green-eyed brigade. (Sorry to use the third person, JDon, but you started it - there are plenty of BA pilots posting on this thread, you can address us directly if you like)

The graveyards are full of those who thought they were indispensible, JDon, we in BA don't think that.

But we know we're not quickly replaceable. You don't get many spare -400, 777 type-rated pilots strolling down tha Bath road (except BALPA reps on their way to a meeting ;) )

BA training is busting a gut to get its pilots on the right aircraft for the huge Winter programme they've planned - a short sharp shock would make management take us a little less for granted...

Oh dear, I think J Don has been taking a walk down Alzheimers Lane again. Lets say he's been working at BA for 30 years, that would be a date of joining of 1976 ish. Given that WW2 ended in 1945, assuming an 18 year old WW2 pilot in 1945 went straight into BAs predecessors on VE day he'd be 48 when Don joined BA, with a retirement age in those days of 50. Even if Dons been working at BA for much longer than 30 years, the chances of him coming into professional contact with a significant number of ex-WW2 pilots seem pretty slim. Still, nostalgias not what it used to be and the retired skippers I know certainly don't speak of the small number of veterans they flew with with anything like the reverence JD does!

So when is it going to happen then this strike!

Are you sure about that? I am now an employment lawyer (after bugging out of the aviation biz -- law was my Plan B), and that doesn't sound right to me.

Granted, I am in the U.S., so I could be wrong about U.K. / European law. But under U.S. age discrimination law, layoffs made according to a seniority system are absolutely NOT a violation of federal age discrimination law, even if it ends up disproportionately impacting people of certain age groups more than others. If layoffs are done according to an established seniority system, that is basically an absolute defense to a charge of age discrimination.

As I said, I am in the U.S., so it might be different in the U.K. However, I did have occassion to research U.K. employment discrimination law at one point in the past few years, and I seem to remember coming across the same concept in U.K. law.

So -- serious question (not trying to be a wise guy) -- is there a case or some source you could cite supporting what you say? I'd be curious to know the current status of the law in the U.K. (If I have time I'll try to dig up my research.)

Heres some information:

http://www.acas.org.uk/index.aspx?articleid=1046

http://www.clarkslegal.com/download/...inar_Notes.pdf

Thanks for the links . . .

But they don't really address my point (unless I missed it). I did see a reference to LIFO systems in general potentially being risky, but not within the context of an established seniority system. That might seem like splitting hairs, but at least under the U.S. employment discrimination laws (which tend to have much in common with those in the U.K.), there is a definite difference between making employment decisions based on "age" (= potential illegal discrimination) vs. "seniority" (= no problem).

On the other hand, in some areas the U.K. laws are a bit more employee-friendly, so maybe this will turn out to be one of those areas.

In any case, it seems like these are new laws for the U.K. so some of these contours may have yet to be worked out.

Out of curiosity, if seniority is not to be used in deciding things like pilot redundancies, in your opinion how should the decision be made about whom to let go?

Cheers.

Whoah guys.

Can we keep this to the BA pension subject?

There is no way BA are looking to make pilots redundant, so this is all totally irrelevant to this subject. Thanks in advance.

The seniority list and the existing Last in First Out Agreement was not used by BA during the break up of Dan Air in 1992. The most senior Captain was made redundant and the most junior first officer with 5 months service was retained in BA. He is now a BA 777 Captain. Anybody that thinks they can rely on fair play with BA senior management is dreaming.

Fair for whom - the senior chap with a pension and a lifetime's career achieved, or the junior chap with the possibility of facing square one again?

I wish seniority and LIFO were illegal, but they are not. One reason being that companies can end the employment of - say - a whole fleet, without incurring the expense of retraining, ending up with an age profile that is "lumpy", and discriminating against younger chaps at the expense of those with the experience - who would in theory be more likely to be able to find jobs.

On the other hand, it is not illegal here, and this is the structure with which we have to live.

If you do strike can you make it on the same day as BMI might look like we all belong to the same union then!

Lucifer reading some of your posts you are quick to criticise wannabees who judge our careers or training centres when they obviously have no experience of either. Yet you are quite happy to attack the concept of a seniority list while either obviously not being part of one ( or being at the bottom ).

I wont waste bandwidth explaining why a seniority system is vital to our industry for reasons of safety, promotion, and income protection. Look it up, instead of looking up at it and whinging in ignorance!

Back to the thread. BA pilots had better be more than willing to strike as Mr. Walsh operates a philosophy that means 'if the staff are not ballotting for action then I'm not pushing them hard enough'.