DAA Staff offered €32,500 lump sum to move to T2

darkman2

Fears for airport jobs as staff snub switch to second terminal



Monday May 31 2010

A small number of staff offered lump sums of up to €32,500 to move to Dublin Airport's new terminal are expected to apply by a deadline today.

Sources reveal that the equivalent of around 30 full-time staff at Terminal 1 have submitted applications to work in the new €600m state-of-the-art building at Dublin Airport.

But fears are growing that there may be compulsory redundancies if the Dublin Airport Authority (DAA) does not get 100 full-time workers at the older terminal to transfer to the newly built one.

.........

Irish Independent

http://www.independent.ie/national-news/fears-for-airport-jobs-as-staff-snub-switch-to-second-terminal-2201198.html


Absolute disgrace:mad: They work for the DAA - why don't the DAA say move or get fired instead of giving lump sums like that to move a few metres down the road. An absolute disgrace. And the Unions still think they have nothing to do with the mess this country is in. Carry on like that is the main reason this country is in the state it is in.

Bluetonic

The payment is to move to a new contract, one which pays considerably less and also has less favorable terms and conditions than the contracts they are currently binded to.

The DAA, like any employer state or private, can't force an employee to take a pay cut or change the terms and conditions of their contracts without employee agreement.

Why did you decided to edit the article selectively to ensure it reads out of context? No need to let the facts get in the way of a good story I suppose.

murphaph

Bluetonic wrote: »

The payment is to move to a new contract, one which pays considerably less and also has less favorable terms and conditions than the contracts they are currently binded to.

The DAA, like any employer state or private, can't force an employee to take a pay cut or change the terms and conditions of their contracts without employee agreement.

Why did you decided to edit the article selectively to ensure it reads out of context? No need to let the facts get in the way of a good story I suppose.

The state can actually. It already has in the last budget

DAA are at least preventing the unionised disease of innefficiency from spreading from T1 to T2, fair play to them for deeming T2 a different company and offering contracts that are realistic in this day and age. If the old guard in T1 don't see the compulsory redundancies coming down the tracks then that's their tough luck tbh, no sympathy. DAA is a semi state and the state that owns it is flat broke.

Bluetonic

murphaph wrote: »

The state can actually. It already has in the last budget

Realistically without revolt.

murphaph

Bluetonic wrote: »

Realistically without revolt.

There has been no revolt, low scale work to rules that achieve nothing. Eventually even the stupidest PS workers will realise the money is gone.

Bluetonic

murphaph wrote: »

There has been no revolt

Yet. But lets not drag the topic off into the wilderness.

The issue at hand is the shortsighted original post.

Jayuu

Can I suggest that we merge this into the existing Terminal 2 thread. It's really not worth being a seperate topic.

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055658371

Zebra3

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darkman2 wrote: »

Carry on like that is the main reason this country is in the state it is in.

Nope. The reason for that is the collusion between politicans, bankers and developers.

darkman2

My dear fellow, you are so naieve.

Bluetonic

darkman2 wrote: »

My dear fellow, you are so naieve.

Any chance you can address the question in post 2?

syklops

murphaph wrote: »

DAA are at least preventing the unionised disease of innefficiency from spreading from T1 to T2, fair play to them for deeming T2 a different company and offering contracts that are realistic in this day and age. If the old guard in T1 don't see the compulsory redundancies coming down the tracks then that's their tough luck tbh, no sympathy. DAA is a semi state and the state that owns it is flat broke.

Few private companies would last very long if they had to set up a new company just to move buildings.

Zebra3

darkman2 wrote: »

My dear fellow, you are so naieve.

Please do enlighten me with your wisdom......

Zen65

darkman2 wrote: »

And the Unions still think they have nothing to do with the mess this country is in. Carry on like that is the main reason this country is in the state it is in.

This is a rather peculiar perspective on recent history. I would not defend the union's position on this matter, simply because I am not informed enough about the issue, but I know that the Irish Independent article is inaccurate, or at least incomplete. If Bluetonic's assertion is correct, then the lump sum would seem to be compensation for a new employment contract, where there is a reduction in earnings or change of work practice which will yield a saving in the longer term?

Leave that aside for a moment. Let's examine the assertion by darkman2 that the unions are the main reason that the country is in a mess?

The mess this country is in seems on the face of it to be linked in no small way to the fact that we have had to bail out a small number of private companies to the tune of some tens of billions of euro. Some of our Banks deliberately acted in a manner to conceal their financial performance, until it was too late. They were part of a massive pyramid scheme involving private developers who were selling housing and commercial buildings at extortionate rates for enormous profit margins. Many of those developers were also defrauding the banks at the same time by setting up ghost mortgages which went quickly into default, but ensured the developers still "sold" their stock of housing to fictitious buyers. Similarly landowners secured unreal prices for land to allow the developers to continue their businesses.

Meanwhile similar practices in other countries (US in particular) gave rise to the collapse of the sub-prime credit market, and eventually when the knock-on of that was to hit international banks the whole financial market fell into a nasty little heap of deceit and negative equity on the floor. OK that's treating the whole thing a little simplistically, but it's about 80% correct.

Where is the union involvement here? I can't see it. What I have seen so far is CEO after CEO act in a manner that is clearly improper and wreckless (in most countries it would be illegal, but Ireland has a lot more grey on our statute books). Look at the Quinn group, once the mighty leading company on these shores but now destroyed because their leader decided to gamble on a friend's bank !!

So again, where is the union involvement here? Certainly the unions fight for better conditions for their members, and those sometimes mean using political leverage to get payments which are unjust, but on the grand scale of our country's finances it's just noise. I don't defend their actions, but I don't see the unions pocketing billions of euro from the state.

It's just too easy to be allowed to turn on ourselves when the country is in crisis, to fight over whether or not the teachers and gardaí are over-paid, when the issue is that a small handful of individuals have led the country into financial ruin. It's a distraction. We have been sold out and the vendors are engaging in smoke and mirrors tactics to obscure the reality of our position.

I'm not a member of any trade union, nor any political party, and I have little time for either of these groups of self-serving parasites. I'm not a civil servant. I look at the tactics of our government and I marvel that they were not dragged into the streets and publicly flogged by angry mobs (I don't support that option either, to be clear). The rules are still being made in favour of the private financier, the very creature who got us into the mess we are in. Just the other day the government announced that they are planning to sell the VHI and introduce risk equalisation to make it an attractive buy.

So, when we owned it, risk equalisation for VHI was not necessary, but put it into the hands of a private financier and you have to operate risk equalisation?? Why is that?? Was it wrong for the people of Ireland to be allowed to share in the profitable operation a company which we built, so risk equalisation (which was promised when the private health insurers came into the market) was abandoned?? Our government believes that the only people who should be allowed profit from this sort of operation are the decent, respectable, private health insurance industries ... like Quinn ???

Excuse the rant, it's not typical of me. I don't work for any of the companies that I'm speaking of; I just reach a point of exasperation when the tactics of a government so hell-bent on making life a luxury for the few at the expense of the many seems to work so well that darkman2 and others look to the still-employed and their unions as being the heart of the nation's problems, and cannot see that the greed of the few, aided by our government representatives, have robbed us and our children blind.

Ahh, that's better ... it's off my chest now!! Forgive me for straying off-topic.

For the record, I fully support healthy competition between private and state-owned business. I believe this is what our government should support. When it comes to building infrastructure, we need to remember that it's being built for us. I have no problem with business-minded people using that infrastructure in a way that brings them wealth, but I object to having to make them wealthy with my money before the infrastructure gets built.


Enjoy your day,


Z

Amtmann

Moved from Infrastructure.

Cookie_Monster

Should be in Irish Economy or Politics, pay rates and contracts are nothing to do with C&T really.

Anyway Bluetonic is entirely correct in the 2nd post. The real scandal here is the rates staff are currently on in T1 not the pay off to move to reduced terms. If it wass me I'd certainly not be moving a taking such a big paycut if I didn't have to.

For instance, a security supervisor paid up to €57,414 in Terminal 1 can only be paid up to €37,760 in Terminal 2, according to the regulator.

So if they get the max 32k, its only just a year and a half pay difference. Not likely

parsi

syklops wrote: »

Few private companies would last very long if they had to set up a new company just to move buildings.

The Irish Examiner did something similar when they moved out of Academy Street and used that to spin-off their printers.

gjim

Zen65 wrote: »

So again, where is the union involvement here? Certainly the unions fight for better conditions for their members, and those sometimes mean using political leverage to get payments which are unjust, but on the grand scale of our country's finances it's just noise. I don't defend their actions, but I don't see the unions pocketing billions of euro from the state.

Just noise? Excluding the cost of putting money into the banks, the government is borrowing over 20 billion a year to fund spending and one of the biggest components of state's bill each year is public sector salaries and pensions. The huge unsustainable increase in spending was engineered by the unions using benchmarking/social partnership.

And this deficit has nothing to do with the cost of the banking crisis (which through balloonheaded government policy may well cost 70 billion) and would have f*cked the country even in the absence of a property bust or a banking collapse.

As far as I can see, the unions were in cahoots with FF - through the mechanism of social partnership - just as much as property developers and bankers were. They milked their "special" relationship just as much as the gombeens in the tents in Galway did. Just look at all the semi-state directorships handed out to union bosses over the last 10 years.

I'm sick of hearing hearing hypocritical whiney union bleating about how it's all the developers/businessmen's fault and the exact same sh*te from the other end of the spectrum bleating about how it's all the unions' fault.

Zen65

gjim wrote: »

Just noise? Excluding the cost of putting money into the banks, the government is borrowing over 20 billion a year to fund spending and one of the biggest components of state's bill each year is public sector salaries and pensions.

This is true. We have a very inefficient and expensive public sector, but the blame for that cannot be leveled at the unions alone. There's a long history of poor management, appalling planning, vested interests and political interference at play here.

My point is that singling out one of the causes (in this case the unions) and blaming it as "the main reason" (per Darkman2) for our economic woes is simply popularist nonsense. This is the kind of tabloid-speak which stops us from solving our problems because we're too busy stabbing each other in the back.

gjim wrote: »

I'm sick of hearing hearing hypocritical whiney union bleating about how it's all the developers/businessmen's fault and the exact same sh*te from the other end of the spectrum bleating about how it's all the unions' fault.

I share your sentiments.

Keep the faith,

Z