Core Pay Meeting 17th April
- Friday, April 17, 2009, 18:25
- Featured, Salary & Structure
- 1,190 views
- 4 comments
Today, the ATCO Pay Negotiators as part of the Joint NTUS Pay Team, met with NATS with regards to an offer on Core Pay. At this meeting, NATS made their ‘best and final’ offer which involved using a blended RPI based on a combined Aug 2008 and Aug 2009 RPI figure. This is a different way of doing a pay deal and takes account of the rapidly changing economic environment we have found ourselves in.
The offer on the table does not involve any changes to our current T’s & C’s and has been the culmination of months of difficult negotiations.
The next step is for the ATCO Pay Team to present the NATS offer to the ATCO Branch Executive, at which point the BEC will endorse or reject the offer. It is hoped to make this presentation to the BEC by 22nd April. After the offer has been presented to all constituents of the NTUS, full details will be communicated to all members along with the recommendation of the BEC. This will be followed by a ballot of the members as soon as practicable.
At this stage, whilst we understand that there is a desire for information, we hope members will understand that contents of the negotiation need to remain confidential until members of the Executives have been briefed. We are also aware that there are a number of ‘rumours’ circulating around NATS and on the internet, most of which are untrue, so it is vital that members only rely on information which is formally distributed to them by the ATCO Branch or the NTUS.
(To be read in conjunction with the NTUS Pay Circular)
About the Author
4 Comments on “Core Pay Meeting 17th April”
Write a Comment
Gravatars are small images that can show your personality. You can get your gravatar for free today!
Since the dissemination of information was admitted at Conference (2009) by the Executive as being something of a weak area in recent years. I hoped that this site would do something to rectify this situation. However all it seems to say above is that information is to be kept confidential, something I knew before logging on to the site. I realise that negotiations can be tense but if the membership were told what exactly things like ” The offer was derisory and had so many strings attached that it was rejected out of hand by the NTUS” meant then perhaps people would be more on board. One of the biggest errors of the union in recent times IMO on the pension issue was that it failed (either by accident or management agreement) to inform the staff as to how far negotiations had come from the initial management offer. In fact to this day I still don’t know what the initial offer on the pension issue was and I personally feel that the union’s reputation was severely damaged because of it. That being the case its impossible to see if the union is doing a good job or not something which surely plays into the hand of management. If negotiations were made transparent from the start, perhaps management would think twice about making such derisory offers from the beginning giving the members added confidence in the union and reducing the time taken in the negotiation process. Perhaps then we would be looking at a pay deal on time as opposes to 3 months, 18 days late and counting. Its very simple, the first order of business should be “open and honest” before anything is taken forward. That said its good to hear there’s an offer without effecting T&C’s as if the union were considering an offer including this, surely we would be back to the issue of negotiating without a mandate.
As this current pay deal seems to be shrouded in mystery, which again is the lack of direct communication and information to members, can Prospect start doing some direct briefing sessions at units so we can ask direct questions and get some direct answers.
As part of the pension hangover from last year, there seems to be a large amount of distrust toward Prospect from operational staff and this needs to be addressed now. The union need to get back the confidence of its members and prove to us that you are in tune with what we want…. again this is all basic communication.
Seemingly this ‘working together’ mentalitly that seems to have been coined by some NATS exec seems to translate to ‘working for NATS’. With all the one way traffic at the moment and by that I mean NATS management taking all they can get and giving nothing back, do we need to stop this ‘practice’ and get back to a ‘them’ and ‘us’ way of negotiating. It’s utterly frustrating to be told that we cannot afford to give you a respectable pay rise when our CEO is rumoured to have gotten over a 9% payrise this year (something yet to be denied), paying tens of millions to airlines as a dividend and bleating on to the media how much profit we make and how financially sound we are. Simple business rules, reward the workforce that got you that record profit and maybe fulfill a destination….. liberating and inspiring people!
I emplore Prospect to get back in touch with its members and take a much harder stance towards these negotiations and increase the communication to us all and regain the faith of the members.
Perhaps it would be helpful if someone from the Executive or the Pay Negotiating team explained very clearly why, and I quote from the above article “….. contents of the negotiation need to remain confidential until members of the Executives have been briefed” because clearly some members do not understand.
Pay negotiations have in the main historically been done as an NTUS and the team of negotiators are formed from the exec committees of the 3 union branches within NATS .(Prospect ATCOs Branch, Prospect ATSS branch and PCS) It is not the full execs who negotiate as this would be unmanageable in terms of numbers therefore when the negotiating team reach what they feel is as far as they can go with Management, the ‘offer’ must be taken by the negotiators from each union to the individual executives, as they are the body that are formally endorse or reject the proposal
The delay with information being forthcoming is to allow the 3 Execs to meet and properly discuss the ‘offer’. After that a response to NATS Management is made as a collective by the NTUS, and subject to endorsement, a ballot is then organised. The communication that you have received is not intended to keep members ‘in the dark’ but was instead attempting to keep people right up to date with the situation. The process described above always occurs when a ballot takes place and the details will be made fully available prior to any vote.
As of today, the ATCO Exec has met and the PCS and ATSS Execs are due to meet very shortly. At the end of the day, it will be the members who decide whether any offer will ultimately be accepted following a ballot of each union.
I hope this goes some way to explaining the process we follow and where we are at the moment.”
Stuart Osman
Vice Chair
Prospect ATCOs’ Branch