SN1203 wrote:
Oh God Do us all a favour and post here what you earn on average on a monthly basis (including per diems and stuff)... and don't come up with 1.750 EUR net (which most of the office people don't earn btw).
Please do ask your management about the cost of the X-mass party and get back to us. BTW, it's not 'they' who are having a X-mass party, it's also 'you' who is having a party.
Respect is a matter of perception, ever thought you're maybe (badly) influenced by some negative colleagues? Reading all the horror stories here, I'm getting surprised that the company you work for is even able to get a plane airborne... maybe it's not so bad afterall?
To me it looks like you need to hire Air_Key_West as soon as possible, who (as a qualified armchair CEO) would be able to turn things around at the shortest possible time with the best strategic decisions!
If you take all ground staff and flight crews together, my estimated average net salary will be in the region of 1600€-1700 if you include people who are on 75% to 100% contracts . This is using a median projection of each department and includes the higher paid (but still underpaid) pilots, working irregular hours and week-ends very often on 7-2, 7-3 rosters in high responsibility jobs.
As far as I can see and I talk a lot with a lot of people from different departments, optimistic colleagues are becoming a rare animal.
As to Xmas parties, people who should be doing other things will be busy preparing and tidying up for the Xmas Party. This costs money as well.
From the staff point of view, I think that the staff would appreciate much more if the CEO's would take the time to gather small groups of max. 20 people during 1 hour meetings (on the field, inside the aircraft would be a perfect place to do this!) and explain to all the staff one by one what went wrong with Korongo and the financials of 2011 and also talk directly with the staff without the intimidating presence of the managers, on how the processes in the company can be improved and how certain issues can be resolved together.
Something like this will be essential to re-unite the company and solve key issues that are lost in translation.
In my opinion, this will be much more productive than a Xmas party and would take approximately 1 week during which, on top of the exchange of mutual respect, the CEO's can go back to their offices with a lot of first hand material for improvement and opportunities that they can't see from their office window or from the *ss-kissing talks of their managers.
I think that the CEO's are trying hard. They might not be doing it right but they're trying hard.
For example, I don't blame them for the 2009 fuel hedge loss. They probably took this speculative decision in mid-2008 to make sure that the company would be able to stay in business if fuel prices stayed that high. I would have done the same if I were in their position.
Korongo was also a nice idea and project, but here they have no excuses. They can point all the fingers they want, they signed off on it and it was their job to follow up and to make sure that the sister company wouldn't pose a problem for their own company. The impact is not as big as the fuel hedge loss but here there was something that they could have prevented.
What I disagree even more about is the volume & market share strategy of 2011 (which has had a big impact on the yields and the result and I think that when we see the year-end results, the current loss projections are optimistic) and the total rejection of the business case of improving the C class in Europe to draw more traffic from airlines competing on the same city to city routes.
Here again, it's probably not 100% their fault as they don't have much experience in the airline industry but some common sense and open-mindedness to at least do trials would have been warranted.
As to blaming a pax who criticised the "smallness" of the compensation he was offered (really they didn't offer much) when he received a load of Skydrol on his body and clothes, shows that they're not in touch with the reality of the passengers and the field.
Instead, they could have turned it into a huge publicity stunt by offering each of those pax a year long pass on all SN flights, excluding airport taxes. The media outlets would have picked it up and voila, cheap publicity and happy customers.
You would even have customers praying to get a load of Skydrol on their next flight!
SN1203, You're entitled to your opinion and you're probably higher management.
How else could you have posted something like that:
Please do ask your management about the cost of the X-mass party and get back to us. BTW, it's not 'they' who are having a X-mass party, it's also 'you' who is having a party.
The fact is, the unions at Sabena were asking for huge privileges, but the failure of Sabena was a direct result of the failure of its mother company. The unions contributed to the losses and to the failure and were also the reason why the Belgian government didn't want to help out SN and preferred a re-start from DAT, which had a more modest workforce and unions.
10 years later, it's a totally different situation where the workforce isn't asking for more than the absolute minimum of decency.
Is it fair that your director who btw is not the business owner, uses the money he saves on you to make speculative placements and then doesn't supervise them as they should be.