By Bart Smet, Vice-President TCAB

This article summarises the main developments that have happened in Thomas Cook Airlines Belgium since the last edition of our Cockpit Flash.

Increase in duty hours – File your reports!

During the summer season, an increase in the amount of flights operated from Lille, Liege and  Ostend and the associated bus rides resulted in an increase in duty hours. This had a serious impact on the fatigue level and also on the flight crews’ remuneration. We are closely following this issue within  the Company Councils (OR and CPBW). As a result, sign-in times were adapted and planning is trying  to spread the burden as evenly as possible. In addition, less people were flying on the line than  foreseen, for different reasons. Overall this resulted in an increase in workload for the flying staff.  May we remind you to file the necessary fatigue reports whenever you feel fatigued? This can even  be done anonymously. This is of paramount importance if we want to avoid the company reasoning: “No reports, No problem!”

New LoL & Upgrading Policy

As a result of our Common Labor Agreement (CLA) that was signed last year, we are now negotiating  a new Loss of License and a new Upgrading Policy. We had finally obtained to have enough time foreseen on the negotiators’ Duty roster. However, Management found new ways to hinder the talks. During the last months, I personally experienced: wrong and outdated information received, deadlines not respected, promises on remuneration not kept. Furthermore, it is time and energy consuming to find the right information and have everything corrected. As a result, I wanted to step down from the LoL negotiations. This forced management to speak to us and the union secretaries on the subject. They claim all problems were based on some “misunderstandings”. Since we noticed an improvement on the issues mentioned above, we decided to continue the LoL talks.

“Every Voice” Staff inquiry

During the first weeks of September, we had the opportunity to have our voices heard during the “Every Voice” Staff Inquiry. Since pilots are not the only group being confronted with the way our company is treating his staff and given the various ‘misunderstandings’, we are convinced the results will speak for themselves and hope management will this year act upon the results.

Exchange of pilots within the Thomas Cook Group

During the first days of October, the copilots were given the opportunity during a few days to bid for a job offering within the Thomas Group in Scandinavia. Nothing of this has been negotiated with any of the local representatives, nor with any of our Scandinavian counterpart. Since we do not want to stand in the way of our colleagues’ employment, we will not be involved in this opportunity. However, we expect a fierce reaction from our Scandinavian colleagues: nothing has been negotiated and no guarantees have been given, so they might see this as a threat for employment in Scandinavia and a bypass of their employment agreement. With such a rushed decision and by bypassing your representatives, management jeopardized a great opportunity for our colleagues.

Thomas Cook Pilot Group Meeting

The Thomas Cook Pilot Group (TCPG) met on 18 August in Frankfurt, Germany. Among other things, the TCPG agreed on the necessity to set up an information exchange platform and a closer collaboration among pilots of the different branches. This would give pilots of each airline stronger bargaining power in front of Management, who tend to hide or distort the truth in order to reduce terms and conditions. A full report is sent to Thomas Cook members.

Happy landings!