A new tool for pilot representatives

BeCA’s Industrial Working Group (IND WG) already existed de facto for many years, through constant exchange of best (and worst) practices between airline BeCA Vice-Presidents. In order to better coordinate industrial issues and involve more members, we decided to formalise this Working Group and invited all BeCA airline pilot representatives to join it.

Two main reasons convinced us to expand this group. First of all, reinventing the wheel is not productive. Over the years, we noticed that what is happening in an airline today will soon be occurring in other companies. Most of the time, pilot representatives were putting a lot of efforts into these files, starting from scratch, whilst BeCA’s knowledge, experience and external network (legal advisors, ECA, etc.) could have been very valuable to their work and have helped tackle the issues more efficiently. Thanks to this new structure, we will be able to better centralise information on industrial matters that are not or little dealt with by unions.

This group will look, among others, at the following recurring issues that concern all pilots:

• Correct implementation and interpretation of FTL rules
• Set up of a National pilot specific pension system
• Per Diems & taxation issues
• Issues related to airlines’ loss of licence contracts
• Atypical forms of employment (subcontracting)
• Security issues
• Information exchange within European pilot groups (TUI, Thomas Cook, B.Air, EAT/DHL, ASLB)

Secondly, many safety topics that the BeCA Air Safety Committee is handling need to be coordinated with each airline union team. We must ensure for instance – through close cooperation between BeCA and unions – that discussions and decisions at airline level correctly implement the Just Culture principles as promoted by BeCA.

This new working group will therefore provide pilot representatives with a good exchange platform (with ad hoc meetings, a dedicated webpage and a mailing list) that will allow for a better, more organised and more efficient coordination of the work carried out by BeCA and the unions. We highly encourage our members with union representative mandates to join this group by sending an email to our Executive Coordinator, Isabelle de Gandt (beca@beca.be).