Arbitration: first contact

I just had a quick read through the arbitration agreement, published this morning. It’s called the II Collective Bargaining Agreement. But it’s neither collective, nor has much bargaining been included. And it certainly is not an agreement: it’s an imposition.
All the media are reporting that it means a reduction in the hours to work, now 1500. There is a provision for only 1500 to be scheduled, but different articles within the ruling also admit a maximum of 1670 hours of aeronautical activity, plus a further 40 for training, plus up to 80 for overtime. I’m pleased at finally seeing a provision for training hours. But why just 40? And furthermore, why are they further reduced, to 25 in 2012 and 20 in 2013? Is that the importance conceded to training? And the hours are even more than before.
Regarding English and it’s own training, the provision is for Aena to hand out and finance the training, which is to be carried out in one’s spare time. I haven’t yet seen if a decision has been made over controllers’ fate if their exams are failed, but I still think that all essential training for the workplace should be carried out and supervised within the workplace and considered working hours
I’ve also calculatedt how close I am to the 200.000 euros “average” yearly pay promised. From my position I should be comfortably on top of that, but according to my situation in the salary tables, I’m just about on 60 per cent of that, considering before tax numbers. Of course amidst the present crisis it’s hard to complain, but it does prove that the media campaign to demonise controllers is still going strong. And far too many lies are still being told.
It seems like there may be a large quantity of money spared by the company to use discretionally.
This was just a very speedy report. After a couple of days I’ll let you know if things are looking any less gloomy. So far it looks like it's going to be even worse than it was last year. I hope someone can prove me wrong.

The arbitrator's job

His name is Manuel Pimentel, and he’s a former Work Minister from the conservative Government of José María Aznar. He faces a tough decision. Aena (our employer) and Usca (our union) have been unable to reach an agreement after over a year of negotiation. It’s easy to say why. Basically there was some discrepancy between the different positions. The company wanted us to be slaves working h24 with resting rights cropped, and everything else subject to “the provider’s obligation to guarantee continuity of service”. This was interpreted as 100% capacity service, when everyone should know, by now, that there is a shortage of air traffic controllers in Spain.
What about the Union’s requests. If you consider that the agreements between British, French, Portuguese or German controllers were laid upon the table and Usca would accept signing any of them, it doesn’t seem like our position was too radical.
So, what’s going to happen? Will Mr Pimentel refer to before February 5th last, when the agreement between Usca and Aena was legitimate, or will he allow all the illegal Royal Decrees imposed since then to influence his final ruling?
I’m afraid the end result, whether the whole system is going to work, depends not only on this, but also upon whether Aena has enough capacity to implement the changes and comply with it’s part of the Mr Pimentel’s arbtrarion award. Personally, I feel they haven’t and things are going to be rough regardless of the arbitration outcome.

Thank Mr Blanco for the new ATM efficiency!

I’ve been working as a controller for about thirteen years. Until a couple of years ago, in Madrid (my closest example) we used to try to get as many aircraft as possible onto the left runway (shortest taxi). Until a couple of years ago all of us endeavoured to shorten routes as much as possible. Indeed, each traffic –as we say- arriving at Madrid Barajas International Airport probably saved more than ten minutes on average if we take flying and taxi time into account. I have no reason to suppose events didn’t happen likewise in the rest os Spain.
This meant a huge effort by controllers. But we are well aware that each flying minute might mean 50 kilos (or around 25 pounds sterling) of fuel. It was a time of happy crews and passengers. And we, the controllers, ended our workday with a grimace of satisfaction after a very beneficial day of work.
Since then we’ve had to read circulars about noise reduction compelling us to even out traffic between the runways, reprimands from Flow Control trying to ensure that routes are not shortened lest overcrowding occur further along the line, letters by operations managers, or even by Eurocontrol, underlining the need to attentively follow the flight plan in all of its terms.
But above everything else, we have lately had to withstand the impositions of the Minister of Development. With the intention of “optimising” the system, and failing completely to take a grasp of the basic evidence that there’s a shortage of air traffic controllers, he has imposed an increase in working hours together with a reduction in the resting periods.. He has also handed operational management to irresponsible and incompetent engineers who are incapable of changing configurations, or regulating traffic sector capacities at the right time, or giving priority to the necessary flights. On top of this, no consideration at all to human factors. Consequently, we have had overloads, delays and, worst of all, far many more near misses than before.
The ATCOs employer, Aena, enjoying the company of it’s ‘new’ bully cousin, has exerted all kinds of abuse, amongst them, disposing of workers’ days off with no previous advice. What we called the “express shifts”.
Endured we have the draconian impositions, which probably haven’t been equalled in any other civilised country in the world. But it hasn’t been without consequences. Depression and resort to tranquillisers or sleeping pills has been the norm. And the medical leaves, hundreds of them. Some for heart attacks or angina pectoris or even controllers having been stretchered out of their workplace, consciousless. Fortunately, there have been no suicides committed, as did happen in France Télécom, who had used the same consultancy company, McKinsey, as the Spanish Government.
To solve the medical leave problem (absenteeism, they called it), instead of reducing the exerted pressure, the State machinery decided to impose fines of up to 4.500.000 € for faking illness. No typing error. As you might have guessed, the workplace doctor is who’s in charge of deciding whether you’re fit or you’re pretending to be ill. He/she is paid by the same employer, Aena. The doctor has his own pressure in order to keep people at work. And you can’t even get a straightforward report immediately, you need to go through a lengthy process that involves complaining to the Head of the operations room and collecting the final report, many hours later, from the Human Resources department
Sometimes the medical service commits the atrocity of sending controllers with extremely high blood pressure back to their sectors. This isn’t the place to dispute the professionalism of doctors, but it’s a basic fact that they are unable to determine whether one is able to work; they have never seen a cotroller at work (I asked them). Their job depending on it, they would rather exert pressure upon us than the Company. Why don’t they share the responsibility if serious illness or even an airprox results from their decisions? They state that they are not under pressure to give us the thumbs up to go home, but they also express the fact that the report needs “objective parameters” and it is also complicated and five pages long!
Controllers in Spain have been struggling to cope with the pressure for over a year now. Under these circumstances, the only way to try to guarantee safety to both traffic and ourselves is to shield ourselves behind procedures and increase traffic separation, thereby hugely reducing efficiency in favour of safety.
In this environment I casually encounter an envelope in my letterbox. It contains a Eurocontrol project, called AIRE (air, in Spanish). It proposes lots of analyses of aircraft trajectories under “continuous descent”. The same idea of “free flight” created decades ago. The project’s aim is fantastic: considering that aviation contaminates, both atmospheric and acoustically, let’s enforce measures through which all pollution is reduced. Thereafter, hordes of Eurocontrol bureaucrats and technocrats involve dozens of civil servants who devote loads of hours filling in stacks of paperwork, so as to lead to multiple conferences that will show air traffic controllers the best way to do what we already did, very much more profficiently, a couple of years ago.
Controllers are well aware of what needs to be done in order to save fuel, time, noise and money. In fact, it wouldn’t be hard to prove that what has now been saved in controllers’ wages has been squandered many times over in broken shedules, crew hotels, controllers’ medical treatments, illness and leave paid for by the Social Security system and compensation to airlines for excessive fuel waste. Almost all these costs, as opposed to controllers’ pay, come from the taxpayer’s pocket. Probably, billions of euro. There is one person at the end of the responsibility chain for all this: the Development Minister José Blanco López.
And that is where I wonder: what has Mr Blanco, apart from destroying the efficiency of the Spanish Air Traffic Control System and and using the whole issue as a smoke curtain to hide all sorts of antisocial measures, achieved with all this? Ah, yes, he managed to increase the vote expectancy of the Socialist Party for a few moments.
Returning to my ecology argument, how are controllers going to be motivated and retrained now in order to get back to what we previously did quite well? When are we going to be left alone to work efficiently once again? When are these useless politicians going to admit that all this nonsense of flight fee control was absurd and inconsistent demagoguery (as well as admitting that if Airport fees are considered, they really have not been reduced at all). Honestly, will anyone change their business or holiday destination for the fifference of 20 or 30 cents in the price of their ticket?
These excesses of shortsighted and incompetent politicians have probably had the worst ever effect on one of the Spain’s most effective and reliable means of income: Tourism. I’m afraid we will all be paying the price for years to come.
Why didn’t they just state the end to be achieved and leave the pros (pilots and sontrollers) to do it?
If, on the other hand, their real intention was just to destroy the system, to make it less valuable in order to facilitate the sale to private groups, thereby diluting colossal investment errors or budget noncompliances, or just to show a pleasant face to the equally incompetent european bureaucrats, then forget all I’ve said, because from that viewpoint the job has been excellent. I just don’t understand it.
Nevertheless, I feel that citizens have the right to know that they have had their pockeys emptied for the squandering in absurd infrastructures, in budget excesses, and they’re still bearing the burden. And flights are delayed and probably not as safe. In exchange, they can feel happy because the average family is going to make a huge saving on next Summer’s holidays to Spain : exactly one euro!.

Feeling ill and the doctor's responsibility

Everyone has a bad day from time to time. I wasn’t feeling very well when I went to work today, afternoon shift. I went nevertheless, but was a bit blocked and stuffy. I usually have about one or two days like this per year, and frequently it’s on my day off.
Normally I would have an aspirin (in fact I did before leaving home) and just work through it. But during this last year I’ve seen too many incidents to be working without being 100% fit. And you must consider that in my current situation I’m not even the last person responsible for my sector, because I’me undergoing instruction in order to recover my validation after a long leave.
So, I decided to go to the workplace doctor. She’s upstairs from the operations room, less than a minute. I explained that I wasn’t feeling tiptop and she answered that she needed objective parameters. Temperature wasn’t too high, 37,2; and a visible sore throat wasn’t enough. So I had a chat and I tried to convey that the only real way to guarantee maximum safety is to make sure people who are not feeling fit on the day don’t get to work at their sector. It’s a very complicated issue, and once again the debate is upon the limits. The doctor admitted to not being able to know objectively if I had a headache or not. I didn’t, and I really just thought I should be relieved based upon not feeling very well, nothing else.
It turns out that the doctor doesn’t know what an airprox is. (You’ll excuse me for not knowing English jargon for that: literal translations from Spanish are crushing, sanding, or shoving). She has never been in the operations room. She doesn’t have a clue what our job is about. I assumed the doctors are pressurised upon to give as few leaves as possible. She denied it. Finally I stated my opinion that not everything could or should be objective: if a controller isn’t feeling fit, he/she should refrain. There are rules and fines for faking illness, but what about a headache, your dog died last night, or you exceeded yourself in the jogging and you’re sugar’s running low?. These can’t be judged objectively by simple visual examination by a doctor. But they are limiting conditions. So how should it work, because, on the other hand, I admit we can’t have workers pulling out ill whenever they want a day off (although this is a lesser evil).
In the end, the only way to organise this is to base the employer/employee relationship on confidence and good will. And throw in a couple more controllers than are needed in the shift, just in case.
By the way, I finally had high blood pressure, so I did leave for home. The doctor had to fill in five sheets of paperwork (isn’t that pressure against the leave?) and if I want my report –which I will- I have to go through a rigmarole involving the operations room Head and the Human Resources department. And I’ll get my report in a couple of days!
If you’re a controller from abroad, let me know how you do it. In comments below or to simon.a.rance@gmail.com. Thanks