Ops-Normal.org

Woody wrote: ↑

Tue Aug 11, 2020 4:52 pm

Got my Dear John email from BA this afternoon

G-CPTN wrote: ↑

Mon Aug 17, 2020 3:27 pm

It was announced that Easyjet would close their Newcastle base and have now announced that there will be no international flights from Newcastle with Belfast and Bristol the only destinations its customers will be able to fly to from Newcastle.

Wodrick wrote: ↑

Mon Aug 17, 2020 4:18 pm

Where have you seen that international flights will cease from NCL ? they could be covered by a W pattern (eg LGW-AGP-NCL-AGP-LGW)
I have a neighbour here that commutes regularly from NCL by easy He will be well upset,hasn't visited this year though.

Woody wrote:reps been colluding with management

Masked-up and carrying placards and banners, 40 or so demonstrators walk out of a pedestrianised shopping street and make their way to the office of a newly elected Conservative MP, above a Chinese restaurant. Once there, they join in sporadic chants of “No justice, no peace.”

It’s a drizzly, near-silent lunchtime in the Welsh town of Bridgend, a place that has played its own small role in Britain’s recent political convulsions, voting for Brexit and, in 2019, returning its first Tory to Westminster since 1983.

Thanks to plans that were announced in April 2019, Ford will shut its local car-engine works next month, with the loss of nearly 1,700 jobs. Now, the sudden effects of Covid-19 on the local aerospace industry are only adding to the pain. The recession and the prospect of mass unemployment are not distant and abstract things here: they are real, and increasingly urgent.

This small protest has been organised by the trade union Unite. Its focus is British Airways, how the airline has responded to the global crisis in aviation triggered by Covid-19 – and, as the people involved see it, the fact that a huge jobs meltdown in their industry has so far received far too little attention from Boris Johnson and his colleagues.

Some of the people present are cabin crew, who are faced with a policy known as “fire and rehire”, whereby many BA employees must in effect choose either redundancy or reduced pay. Other protesters have come from three places in south Wales where BA engineers see to the nuts and bolts of aviation: the nearby towns of Blackwood and Llantrisant, and a facility at Cardiff airport, where the changes announced by BA will mean about 400 job losses.

Near Caerphilly, nearly 600 posts are being lost at the vast aeroplane engine maintenance plant run by the global giant General Electric, which before the pandemic employed 1,400 people.

Taken together, the losses are a huge blow to a cluster of aerospace sites that up to now were one of the few sources of secure, well-paid and unionised work in a part of Britain whose modern history is bound up with the closure of coalmines and steelworks, and the steady loss of thousands of jobs in engineering and manufacturing. South Wales has suffered nearly 40 years of deindustrialisation; now there is a widespread sense that the Covid crisis could take things to a grim conclusion.

British Airways traces what it is happening to the fact that it has spent five months flying only 20% of its usual schedule. Replying to a set of specific points about the fate of BA jobs in Wales and the airline’s handling of the crisis, a BA spokesperson offers an on-the-record response of just over 100 words. It emphasises “the biggest challenge the airline and our industry has ever faced”, the insistence that “we have to adapt to survive”, and a claim that “It is not too late to find solutions … and to protect jobs”.

One of Unite’s grievances is the fact that whereas past redundancy packages have been based on two weeks’ pay for every year worked, BA now wants to go down to the statutory minimum of one week, subject to a minimum of £15,000. Insisting on speaking anonymously, three men from the Llantrisant plant – which sees to avionics, the electronic aspects of aviation – also talk about the local context for what is happening: job markets stripped of opportunities, and a complete lack of any comparable work.

If they are made redundant, what are their options? “Driving for Amazon or Tesco,” says one.

“Working in Lidl or Morrisons,” offers another.

Keith Morgan is a Unite convenor at the Llantrisant site. He spent the first part of his working life as a coalminer, before he took a job with BA as an electro-mechanical engineer, working on everything from control of planes’ wing flaps to air conditioning units.

“You imagine working in the mines, and then working on components for Concorde,” he marvels. “Supersonic aircraft – it was just unbelievable. We were once all given BA T-shirts, because we’d repaired 100,000 units. And people wore them. People felt really proud of working for British Airways.”

And now? “The older you are, the harder it’s going to be. People who fix aircraft computers looking at driving jobs – it’s sad.”

Read the rest of this long article here..

Woody wrote: ↑

Mon Aug 24, 2020 1:52 pm

Just finished my Tesco job application

Woody wrote: ↑

Mon Aug 24, 2020 1:52 pm

Just finished my Tesco job application