ALPL

Open letter to Commissioners Bulc & Thyssen by the European Cockpit Association (ECA)

Dear Commissioners,

One year ago, we jointly discussed the need to fill the ‘Social Agenda’ chapter of the Commission’s EU Aviation Strategy with concrete life (see here).

One year later, we are still awaiting concrete proposals and initiatives on this Social Agenda. Especially on precarious atypical crew employment, applicable law & jurisdiction, 3rd country crews, and growing social dumping practices.

Social Dialogue – both at national and EU level – has, since then, been mentioned by your services as one of the avenues to accompany urgently needed legislative and regulatory measures.

Social Dialogue, to succeed, must be practiced in a fair, respectful manner and according to set rules. This also applies when one side decides to take legitimate industrial action, abiding by all the rules required for carrying out a legal strike.

Social Dialogue is NOT to potentially sack 100 pilots and 200 cabin crew to de facto punish the Dublin crew base for the strikes that Irish-based pilots are carrying out, and Cabin Crew carried out in Spain, Italy, Portugal & Belgium, last week.

Social Dialogue is NOT to shout ‘hurrah, we signed a recognition agreement with union X, Y or Z’ – but then to drag their feet at the negotiating table for a collective labour agreement, to reject union representatives because they work for ‘competitor’ airlines, to reject demands for a fair seniority agreement, or to reject local law for local contracts for local crew in the country where there are based, live and work.

We call for actions that will address the many social shortcomings and regulatory loopholes in the aviation sector. Loopholes that some players are only too happy to exploit – to the detriment of European aviation workers. But also to the detriment of those airlines that do practice genuine Social Dialogue, employ their employees directly (not via broker agencies or as ‘self-employed’ on zero-hours contracts) and treat them fairly, and who abide by the rules – but who are punished for this ‘out there’ in the market place where other players play a different game.

The current Commission’s term comes to an end next summer. Not much time left. And 2.5 years have already passed since the publication of the Aviation Strategy, in December 2015. But: Still time to act, still time to be bold, still time to show that ‘SOCIAL’ also matters in Europe’s aviation!

We count on you – we count on Europe!

Best regards,

Dirk Polloczek                                               Philip von Schöppenthau
President                                                        Secretary General
European Cockpit Association                 European Cockpit Association

 Open letter to Commissioners Bulc, Thyssen on Social Agenda in EU Aviation, ECA 2018

Ryanair pilots across Europe are united in their determination to engage in meaningful and genuine Social Dialogue with management on issues of common concern to those who contribute to the airline’s success on a daily basis.

In order to allow pilots to consider Ryanair as an attractive employer, not just as a place to start but also as a place to continue their career, several key issues need to be tackled across the entire network. These include:

Ryanair announced it will embrace unions and negotiate on issues that matter to their pilots. Is this what is happening right now?

Yes, if you believe what Ryanair says. But seemingly not so certain if you look at the reality on the ground. After its cancellation crisis, last autumn, and imminent strike threats in December 2017, Ryanair started to reach out to several unions across Europe.
Since then, it reached general ‘recognition agreements’ with pilot unions in the UK and Italy. These agreements are largely procedural in nature, describing how the airline and its pilot union Company Councils interact. They do not touch on any detailed terms and working conditions. These still need to be negotiated.

However, apart from these recognition agreements and from negotiations progressing in Italy, in most other cases, very little progress is being made, and some of the talks are by now completely stuck. Ryanair is portraying the unions as making unacceptable demands, continues to refer to its own unilateral pay increase already offered to individual pilots, but seems not to see that pilots aren’t just interested in pay matters but in a much wider range of issues that affect their working life. Money is not the priority at this stage, it is the many non-pay related issues that matter most to Ryanair pilot representatives and their unions.

The rosy picture drawn by Ryanair in the media on their relationship with unions still needs to be backed up by tangible progress on the many issues of concern to their pilots.

How are negotiations with pilots progressing?
After over 30 years of an openly anti-union attitude, it appears Ryanair still has a lot to learn. It needs to show real commitment to engage in talks not only on their own narrow agenda – e.g. focused mainly on some specific pay-related issues – but on the many issues Ryanair pilots are interested in.

One of the main priorities at this stage is the need for a network-wide and transparent ‘Master Seniority List’ for all Ryanair pilots across Europe, covering issues such as annual leave, base transfers within and beyond national borders, promotion & upgrades, etc. Equally important is the need to give all pilots contracts that are governed by the laws of the country where they are based, incl. jurisdiction in that country, as well as obtaining a Collective Labour Agreement (CLA) that is enforceable under the national rules of the country of the pilot’s base.

Finally, most other airlines leave it entirely to the union to decide who participates in meetings. Ryanair doesn’t. It tries to decide who sits on the other side of the table, resulting in time and focus being lost from the concrete discussions that need to take place.

Click here to take this survey.

Free trade has been one of the good reasons leading to the creation of the European Union. The governments of the founding countries had the idea of free markets with common rules and fair competition. Boundaries had to be brought down and frontiers had to be crossed, which – in the end – worked. Of course it needs constant efforts to keep it free & fair, as we have just seen with the revised “Posted Workers Directive”, but common rules, tools and control bring common wealth.

Last week we have observed on the international scene that those, who make their supporters think that the easy answers are always the best, have now discovered free global trade as the evil in today’s global economy and want to protect their home markets from the negative aspects. One might simply call it the return of protectionism, but that might be too simple. Because at the same time as these populist steps are taken, those responsible aim for unfair advantages in other arenas.

The headlines above are just a glance at the most recent incidents that took place in the past weeks. They show that unruly, drunk passengers know no boundaries and no limits –  their behavior can disrupt any flight, operated by any airline all over the world at any time. Incidents occur now on every 1424th flight worldwide, according to IATA. And will continue to increase their frequency because there is no efficient way to – first of all – prevent potentially unruly passengers to board an airplane and then, possibly, penalize offenders.

This sober realisation however has done little to inspire governments across the EU – and worldwide – to ratify the ICAO Montreal Protocol (MP 14). This protocol is somewhat the only tool that gives hope that unruly passenger incidents could be reduced at a global scale.

The existing legal framework dealing with unruly passengers, contained in the Tokyo Convention on offences committed on aircraft (1963), proved ineffective so far as it grants jurisdiction over offences solely to the state of the registration of the aircraft. This leads to a situation where – upon landing – the Commander delivers an unruly passenger to authorities that simply have no jurisdiction. As a result, unruly passengers are mostly released and allowed to continue their journey without sanctions and free to do the same on their next flight.

Airlines are trying to win over passengers’ hearts with a wide-range of in-flight entertainment, including wi-fi, multimedia and streaming perks. In shrill contrast, behind the cockpit door, multimedia, real-time data & state of the art technologies are still playing catch up. Many pilots receive weather information on black & white paper charts with weather forecasts, which may be non-reliable by the time the aircraft is in the air. Especially for long-haul flights, synoptic charts and satellite images provided in the pre-flight documentation can easily become outdated. The results could range from non-efficient to outright dangerous operations.

Last year 5.2 million minutes of delay were caused by weather (compared to 2,9 million minutes in 2013) and meteorology was identified as a contributing factor in 26% of accidents in 2017. For years pilot experts have called for existing ‘modern’ technologies to be applied to improve the way meteorological information is exchanged & displayed – but to no avail. The latest forecast, however, seems to be more optimistic: change is in the air!

Since several months the government of the United Kingdom and the European Commission are negotiating Brexit, meaning – for the first time in history – a country using Article 50 and leaving the EU. After the first rounds and rather general debates, we have now entered the phase, where the details are thrown at the negotiating table. For many of today’s EU citizens these details are far away. For aviation & its employees they are becoming a shocking reality.

Just a few days after UK’s Prime Minister Theresa May announced that the UK is exploring the options of staying in EASA after Brexit, the European Commission took a rather radical approach. In a note, UK pilots were advised to get in contact with their national authorities because their European pilot licenses might lose their validity soon.

As a pilot, the contrast between the order, structure and coherence of our standard operating procedures sometimes conflicts dramatically with the apparently chaotic way our employment is managed and administered. How can anyone believe that the recent phenomenon of atypical employment of the most safety critical airline staff, enhance our ability to deliver on a pilot’s prime promise – that of a safe flight? Or should we take a new look at the seniority list driven, full time, male dominated structure of the old nationalised airlines? Have they already moved on, offering flexibility without undermining security?

Using experience of the dramatic recent changes in employment models across our industry from some of our members, ECA has succeeded in persuading the European Commission to take a look at the current jobs market in Europe for professional pilots. The Commission is running its own survey to gain an insight into employment models in use in Europe – how they suit the pilots employed in them, how they affect our conditions, fatigue state, work-life balance and most importantly; how they affect our ability to do our job – safely.

The growth of transnational airlines operating throughout Europe, and further afield, has led pilots to recognise that they must cooperate even more closely and adopt new representation methods to address the challenges arising from these new business models. At a meeting hosted by IALPA on 12 April, Norwegian, SAS, easyJet and Ryanair pilots shared ideas and strategies how to improve Transnational Airline Pilot representation within Europe.

“The EU has created cross-border structures to deal with safety and operational matters, like the European Aviation Safety Agency and to deal with economic liberalisation, but the social structures are missing,” says ECA President Dirk Polloczek following the meeting. “This leaves pilots no other option but to look for their own, creative transnational solutions.”

The rapid expansion of transnational airlines and their ability to adapt their business structures across borders and using multiple Air Operator Certificates (AOCs), requires pilots to be coordinating transnationally.