Below the report by BeCA representatives of the main events that happened in ASL Airlines Belgium since the last edition of our Cockpit Flash.

Let’s have look in the rear-view mirror to see what has been achieved in a little bit less than 18 months in ASL Airlines Belgium. In December 2015, after a psychodrama of 3 months and in front of the deadlock in the negotiations, the General Assembly voted unanimously for social actions, forcing the signature of a CLA protecting the jobs after the buyback of TNT Express by FedEx. This positive result gave the conviction to the pilots’ delegation that the time was right to build better tools to protect the interests of all the employees. From that moment on, a decision was made that all new agreements with the unions had to be consolidated in binding CLAs.

Needless to say that it didn’t come overnight. The strike of the 24th of May, just for ASLB’s 1-year anniversary, marked the climax of this complex process. In the wake, 3 new Collective Labor Agreements (CLA) were finally signed:

• the “Working Conditions” CLA will improve the “Productivity Agreement” of 2014,
• the new “Promotion Process” CLA will drive the pilots’ careers and give fair and equal opportunities to all, and
• the “Retraining Process” CLA will ensure a fair management of the failed evaluations.

But that’s not all! Your representatives, and we mean BeCA and unions, were also involved in the drafting of the new Just Culture policy, in the redraft of the FDM policy and in the Fatigue Risk Management policy.

Consequently, ASLB pilots now have a number of very good tools. The career, the (failed!) evaluations, the (reported!) mistakes are now managed by legal documents. This will also greatly simplify the work of ASLB managers. No need for them anymore to invent new rules to solve their problems, or to create new ones… An understood enforcement of these new agreements by all stakeholders will help ease the relationships between pilots and management in the airlines. Last but not least, an additional positive side effect is that it should also greatly simplify the life and the work of the pilots’ representatives…

A further step should be to use now these tools to build a better airline, a better place to work and meet the different expectations. The old mindset has to go and a new relationship between the management and the pilots has to be developed. Are we all ready for this?

Didier Moraine, ECA Director
Rémi Thirion, VP ASL Airlines Belgium