EASY jet strike AMS
 

So,

The klm pilots union managed to push te easy pilots into a strike again in a few hours......

Lets see how it all works out......

Are they suggesting that the previous strike a couple of weeks ago had no success? It's quick to hold another confrontation.

Testpanel,

In the UK the easy pilots are represented by BALPA, in Italy by ANPAC, in Spain by SEPLA, and in France by the SNPL. All of which represent pilots for their national flag carriers as well.

STFU

Well done to these guys! :ok:

The race to the bottom has to stop somewhere and a company giving worse contracts to crew in other bases while at the same time making record profits should be stopped. If only RYR pilots had this much balls! :rolleyes:

And this from a VNV critic!

The other strike was broken by flying in scabs as this is allowed under UK law. The dutch judge allowed this too but also recognised the right to strike and to balance the odds they are now allowed to strike after only 6 hours notice instead of 48 hours :p So the only way for EasyJet to break the strike now is to have full time standby crew in HOTAC in AMS :D

Is that sort of 1970s frothing-at-the-mouth-bolshevik dinosaur hate-language really necessary or appropriate today?

It now sounds even more revolting to my ears than it did back then, especially as now you are calling people who have no choice in the matter vile names like that.

Not good. Not nice. Not clever.

Wageslave,

You might not like the language, but it's what a lot of people will be thinking. In the past this action largely involved management pilots and cabin crew, volunteers who just want a change of scenery or those crawling the greasy pole. Invariably they are not the people who would ever envisage calling on help from a Union should it be required.

Yes it's a four letter word, and not a nice one. But if the contract had been reasonable in the first place, this wouldn't be happening.

Yes....it's even more necessary now. Spineless cowards created this monster. I assume you are management. They do have a choice in the matter. Break the strike and stab your brother in the back or solidarity for better terms and conditions. A senior Delta Captain makes over 300k a year. He also has integrity, morals and abilities that he is appropriately compensated for. Enjoy your turbo diesel Skoda and leave the career to the professionals.

If AMS crews strike then that's wholly at their discretion.

What you morons calling crews 'scabs' need to realise is that under UK law refusing to crew a flight on the grounds that it's to cover industrial action is illegal and will lead to your instant dismissal.

As much as I respect and sympathise with the strikers, my mortgage and the wellbeing of my family, bank balance and career prospects are much more important to me. If I'm assigned an AMS flight that would have been cancelled, then I'm on it wether I like it or not.

The problem in the UK is worsened by the fact that the industry is small here in the UK. What you jolly foreigners don't realise is that airlines in the UK are managed by old RAF squadrons who remain friends and will pass your name round quicker than you could don a pair of clogs. Bang goes your career in the UK. Why the hell should I be banished to the sand pit or dodgy contract work just for the sake of AMS base striking????

Look what happens when you leave a UK airline even on good terms. It's a one way system and in most cases you're black listed. The construction industry here was recently pulled for such actions. The aviation industry still practices it however.

That much for solidarity....

As much as I like Mrs Tatcher I think that the UK rules leave to much desired to protect the works rights to strike. But the nice thing: with Brexit it will be an EU issue rather than a UK issue in the near future and Easyjet with an EU AOC will not be allowed to legally scab strikes :) (ps I dont think that the EJ AOC will be in the Netherlands for some reason ;) )

Another tick in the Brexit box for me then. Yet another massive positive. The new EU AOC will not be in the Netherlands. The Netherlands are probably the most likely of any country to launch a life boat from the sinking titanic which is the EUSSR. They'll probably have to up sticks and move again should Nexit occur.

This. I wish strikers could realise that, as sympathetic as I might be, I'm not quite sympathetic enough to end my own career on your behalf.

Quick as blink the 1970s frothing-at-the-mouth-bolshevik dinosaurs come crashing out of their caves spouting bile,vitriol, ludicrous assumptions and wild non-sequiturs.

I know its irritating that some countries have the moxie to strike while in the UK no matter how badly our Ts and Cs are eroded we won't and BALPA are as wet as a dishcloth but that's the way it is. Solidarity? In EZY UK? Ha!!! What is this? Short memory syndrome too? If you want to go charging off like Don Quixote to fight someone else's war go right ahead, there are plenty of applicants to fill your position when you've destroyed your career in the name of dogma like the miners did. Not smart.

I am as pro-unions as it gets, but demanding that a colleague loses his or her job so that you may get a better pay deal is downright ridiculous. UK EZY pilots have no option but to cover those flights if rostered to do so.

AMS based easy pilots know quite well that their UK colleagues are bound by UK employment law and do not expect for a minute that they go against it. Don't start about scabs because the AMS based easy pilots have no beef at all with UK based easy pilots, only with easy management who say they offer reasonable t&c's but actually don't...

+1.

In some European countries you can hold a strike/refuse to work across borders/work to rule at the drop of a hat with reasonable impunity, safe in the knowledge that when your Union say it's OK you can rock back up to work and suffer negligable consequences.

Do that in some other countries and unless you're union has been very clever you're fired for indulging in illegal industrial action, and there's no protection in law. It's yet another example of how European pilots associations are struggling to cope with hard driving pan-European businesses.

Already today wrong. Local contracts means local employment laws, and many are very similar to the UK ones in that regard. Of course, one could always call in sick, but that is somewhat risky as well, dependent on where you work (pretty much riskless where i live).

Well, it is really struggling with the fact that working/employment law is not unified in europe. Or to say it in another way: companies do have it easy as they can work cross-border, unions can't as the law doesn't allow it.

Yes, it's "Back to the EUSSR" where the system is rigged in such a way that; heads = ordinary workers lose out, and tails = the big corporations win. :mad:

And there's the rub

Sounds like the workers have one hand tied behind their back, or they can only bring a knife to a gun fight. It's about time some of the union funds was spent on better lobbyists; if there are any now?????

Unions do pay lobbyists. But it depends of course how much money any union has available. And ECA is lobbying in brussels on behalf of the single unions as those can only lobby with their national governments. I would say that the ECA budget is way too low for the amount of work they have to do, it is a very tiny organization.

Big companies always have much deeper pockets for lobbyists, even the small ones can afford usually more than the unions can.

It's amazing that some pilots are knowingly breaking a strike...and coming up with excuses for accepting substandard terms and conditions.

4runner

What is amazing is that you cannot see why a pilot might choose not to definitely lose his job to possibly help another pilot improve their Ts&Cs

Just Call in Sick.... Help Out a little...

The elephant in the room is why UK pilots have so little protection.

Who do you blame for this? The pilots themselves? Their union?? The EU???

Hard to believe employment protections vary so much across Europe after so many years of EU membership.

F&B

Nope you blame your own government.... That is what the UK politicians (like most european politicians actually...) have been very good at: if it goes wrong it is dueto the EU and if it goes right it is down to them!

The most interesting example on this is steel plant that TATA wants to close/ sell or whatever due to low steel prices.. Everybody in the UK was blaming the EU and others but interestingly it was Cameron himself who wanted to keep the tax on Chinese steelimports much lower than the rest of the EU! But in the mean time the Dailymail and the likes had a field day blaming it all on Europe.. :yuk:

Tatcher and the conservatives I would say?

"UK EZY pilots have no option but to cover those flights if rostered to do so"
You can always call in sick. When you help other pilots to improve their T's & C's in the end you're help yourself, if you don't you're hurting yourself.
And I can smell a lot of scabs here. Pilots always their worst enemies.

Are you so short sighted, selfish and foolish that you can't see passed your own glare shield or windscreen of your Skoda diesel? You're not improving just his T&C's. It's yours too along with several thousand others. Orrrrrrrr, you can be a coward and lower the bar. Don't justify your lack of a backbone to me. In the US, your name would be on a master list...but then again, we invented it, YOU perfected it...

Well, the US has a truly common market, the EU doesn't. We can't even represent all pilots with the same union, even if we wished to do that. We have to have a union in each separate state. And each separate state has separate and different employment laws, some are very open to industrial action, some are not, some pretty much have outlawed it alltogether.

Now picture that each US state has to have its own pilots union, even if all pilots are employed in one company. That the employment laws are different in each state and most do not allow to refuse work even if the pilots of the same company working under a different contract in a different state are on strike.

Of course, pilots could call in sick. The first time that happens it will go through, the second time it happens each separate union will be sued for an illegal strike, in most states found guilty and liable for any damages the airline has suffered.

As a union rep i have to deal with the conditions we live in, not some phantasy ones we wish we had. Yes, last time i was organizing a strike action i couldn't do anything against the fact that all of a sudden a lot of austrian registered aircraft sat on the tarmac in germany, their crews in the hotel just waiting to take over. And i don't blame those crews, they had the choice between working, or never working for that airline group again.

Calling in sick just kicks the can down to the standby crew who won't be impressed at the position you have put them in.

You could also run the risk of being interviewed by HR for pattern sickness because the dodging the requirement to be available during industrial action could demonstrate a pattern if you did it more than once.

Negotiation would be best practice.

I think the unfortunate scabs thing has already been covered but I thought they flew in management pilots as well? Why don't you go on strike at the weekend?

No you wont... You dont have to Call in Sick on every flight, bit if everyone does it, and a little coordintion is done between the crews, you Have come a very very long Way.
The stby crews Will have to show a minimum of Balls Also, along with all the colleuges. If we dont, Whats the point of threatning with a strike (war) when management knows no one has the Balls to really fight for their terms. When It Comes Down to a strike, its war. War is not pretty, and it takes guts. Otherwise we Loose.

you have protection under the law if you ballot and provide notice by statute and you have more leverage for negotiation.

Remember the co ordinated sickie thrown by Cabin Crew at a National Carrier a few years back? It annoyed the passengers more than the management.

Like so much on here, there is widespread ignorance of the law. For our US colleagues, easyJet is a UK-based company with bases all over Europe and employs pilots on different contracts depending on which country they are based in due to different taxation, employment laws, pensions, social security arrangements etc. They nonetheless operate to a common set of SOPs and so a Berlin-based French captain can be called out to operate in Italy etc.Love her or hate her, Margaret Thatcher basically destroyed the power of the Unions in the UK. Her legacy is is that UK laws are absolutely anti-union and there are specifically no protections in place for those who try to have sympathetic strike action, secondary picketing etc. Therefore it is common practice to use UK-based crews to cover strike action elsewhere. So if a UK-based pilot were to refuse to operate out of AMS, that would open him/her up to disciplinary action. Unless you live in the UK, you do not understand how it works, but any UK-based pilot will tell you that to refuse to go is not really a credible option.

4runner

I am not an airline pilot at present. No cowardice here.

Why don't you strike?

If all you brave pilots at your airline went on strike to support the AMS strike, perhaps that would have an effect?

Too chicken?

It's not as easy as that to call a strike in the uk. Takes an awful lot to organise and generally will end up in the courts for a judge to decide if the strike can go ahead. Not as simple as announcing we will go on strike next week.

UK pilots do sympathise with our AMS colleagues, but if the UK pilot is called out to cover and he/she refuses then they will be down the job centre looking for a new job, there is no protection for the UK based pilot.

Tourist?

UK pilots have been beaten and scattered by the industry and the weak UK labour laws.

If you asked the question of 10 UK pilots, you would get this sort of response:-

2 would say 'bring it on'
4 would say 'I'm scared of losing my job'
2 would say 'what would the public think'
2 would say 'I'll just look after myself, thank you'.

And that's all before you even ask your unions permission.

Balls, UK pilots do not have.

Discuss.

F&B

I would say work in accordance with the contract you signed and the labour laws applicable.

New strike in the morning. Six departures and six arrivals cancelled.