Aer Lingus Flight Crew Industrial relations thread 2024

Starting salary is €45k. That's based on a COVID recovery scale. Yes, a C19 cut is hard wired into the payscale for new joiners. Add in maybe 100k debt as most pilot's pay for their own training and licence. Pay claim is essentially just looking for inflation tracking after a five year freeze.

Have a serious medical issue at any stage and you're career ends

Oh and forty years of multiple checks, training and assessments and quite a bit of responsibility every day and especially on those stormy days when RTE are screaming at everyone to stay indoors.

Mods will probably remind us this is a route and fleet thread. Fair enough, maybe we need a new thread the. I'm sure every pilot would just rather be flying those routes but they can't just sit on an effective 25% pay cut due to inflation whilst management reward themselves.

Just wondering why the pilots would care what the public think? The public aren't going to win them a pay rise nor has public support ever mattered to any group going through IR disputes. They should fight for their fair share just as any union would be expected to.

Some facts:

Starting salary cadet pilot = €36k

Starting salary experienced pilot = €45k

Starting salary 320 rated pilot = €59k

Starting salary Captain = €88k

Top of Incremental Scale is reached after 26 years of service.

During Covid Pilots took a 50% paycut to Basic. Effectively a 70% paycut due to no flying and therefore no variable pay.

Pilots existed on effective 30% pay for 18 months and advocated for antigen testing, vaccines and then the restart/continuation of aviation and of the airline throughout the pandemic. They flew 30hr round trips to Beijing to bring PPE back to Ireland at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. They were ready to go for any other Cargo contracts that materialised if Aer Lingus commercial showed ambition to secure any.

Pilots who joined after April 2020 are still on an effective 10% paycut.

Pilots have had no payrise since their 2017 pay deal applied a 2% increase in June 2019.

The Aer Lingus Incremental pilot is the same now as it was in January 2010.

INFLATION IN THAT TIME PERIOD 29.2%

For New Joiners since April 2020 the Aer Lingus Incremental pilot payscale is 10% less than it was in January 2010.

The pilots seek a total pay increase of 40 to 45 million across the business. Aer Lingus carried 10.7million passengers in 2023.

The total pilot pay claim if awarded would cause fares to increase by between €3 to €5 per ticket per passenger.

Since 2019 the average total pay increase for Irish workers is 24%.

The top 3 managers Lynne Embleton (CEO), Elizabeth Haun (CFO) and Donal Moriarty (Chief of Corporate Affairs). Enjoyed a 155% payrise in 2023. Splitting a package of €2.8million between them

Who is being unreasonable? The pilots who maintain a career for 30 to 40 years with the airline and are invested in its success or the Aer Lingus senior management who are there for a few years before moving onto the next personal money making scheme……

Very interesting, thanks for posting.

Could I ask what is a FO after 8 years earning per month including all allowances and flight pay. Can you also include the numbers for a Capt with 20 years service. Could you provide your best guesstimate/ballpark for each.

’Hopefully’? For who? The only people benefiting from such a scenario would be IAG shareholders. Why would any ordinary worker in Ireland be hoping other workers get screwed over for the sake of some unseen - and already incredibly wealthy - shareholder? Honestly, the lack of self-awareness and begrudgery the public-at-large show when any group of workers try to better their circumstances is shameful. All while, according to CSO figures, that same general public has enjoyed an average of ~24% increase in their own pay since 2020.

Every other worker in Ireland (with some very rare exceptions I believe) is entitled to use industrial action in defence of their livelihoods. I don’t know why anyone would expect different from aviation employees.

Regardless, how do you suppose a ‘Malta AOC’ would work? Who are they going to get to work for them? The costs you’re suggesting to be apparently saved would be on wages - airlines are struggling to attract and retain staff as it is with current T&Cs so how do you think paying people less is going to work? O’Leary had to go and buy a flippin’ housing estate just to try retain new hires for at least a year because the cost of living in Ireland is driving foreign hires back home again.

Did I hear some EI management head throw out €40M for the cost of the pay demand? €40M. A rounding error on IAG’s balance sheet. The lads and ladies in EI are only asking for their spending power to be restored to what it was 4+ years ago - something any business as wildly profitable as EI has zero valid argument against. They should have everyone’s full support.

(Apologies to the Mods for derailing the thread again)

Ryanair pilot pay has improved significantly in the last few years. An Irish based skipper in the height of the summer nets between €8500 - €9200 ish.

The problem they have is it’s a ferocious career doing 35yrs of slogging Europe max hours on an early /late/ early / roster. Most days there are 4 sectors.

Mr Moriarty has been saying certain figures to the media and adding in the pension for max impact.

Not so ‘significantly better’ that EI hasn’t seen new hires from FR leave and go back to FR over the last few months. Such was the unmanageable pay cut they experienced.

The pay scales for EI pilots were established and agreed many years ago. Like every other worker in the country, they’re entitled to expect the value of their pay to be sustained in line with inflation - particularly when the company is paying millions in increasing bonuses to executives. Had EI management proactively raised salaries in line with inflation over the past few years then its pilots wouldn’t need to now be asking for it in one large lump - with the associated large-looking numbers.

FR not paying their pilots as much as EI is a problem solved by FR paying more, not by EI paying less.

For some added context if we’re going to drag other companies into this - on a given day on the Atlantic, EI’s US competition will have flight decks with skippers on ~$450K and FOs on ~$250K. Meanwhile, EI’s flight deck could have a combined total salary as low as ~$190K. With all the recent command upgrades and new hires, EI’s LR flight deck is the cheapest in the sky and even a 24% pay rise won’t change that.

Did we listen to the same interview? Moriarty came across extremely disingenuous and - likely unknown to the general public - the points he made were demonstrably dishonest. To the extent that clips of his answers are getting memed HARD in WhatsApp groups. For example - suggesting that EI’s pilots HAD, in fact, received average pay rises of 24% over the last 4 years through the incremental pay scale. EI management know well this is a pathetically disingenuous argument but those are the only sort of arguments they’ve got left, it seems. Increments are not pay rises. If the company genuinely believed that, then they’ve already contradicted themselves in offering any sort of % increase at all.

A mind-boggling lack of self-awareness, really. And Moriarty should be forced to admit that dishonesty at some point in the future.

Which facts, specifically, have been ‘debunked’ in the media? Bearing in mind, the media has no capacity to ‘debunk’ anything on its own. Everything the media reports is based solely on what’s reported to it by vested interests. EI’s pilot pay scales aren’t hard to find online and the numbers listed in the comment you quoted are verifiably spot-on.

Operating profit at Aer Lingus was €225m in 2023, up from €45m in 2022, but still about €50m lower than 2019. Operating margin in Ryanair and Aer Lingus seems to be about 10%, so costs need to be carefully managed.

From the couple of European destinations I've checked, flight prices are definitely softer now than at the same time last year even without the effect of a strike, presumably due to the effect of higher interest rates on family budgets.

The added threat of a strike stops people booking ahead - they don't want the added uncertainty, reducing revenue, and that's before all the compensation claims for existing bookings

Basing such a substantial pay claim on one year's profits that looks unlikely to be sustained and on what I think most would regard as very good salaries looks like financial suicide to me. Aer Lingus management need to spell it out.

The vast majority of workers in the private sector do not benefit from an incremental pay scale. Increments are, by definition, a pay rise.

As defined by what? No, from the point of view of industrial relations and pay negotiations, increments are not considered pay rises or ‘pay awards’ if you will. If they were, none of us would be having this conversation.

EI knows this. So any argument made otherwise is a bad faith and disingenuous one.

I’m been at Aer Lingus’s top tier frequent traveller club every year since 2006. I fly a lot with EI. This year in my experience has been the best year in terms of on time performance. Going in the other direction has been the fares. It’s getting to be really expensive. Wanted to book a weekend trip to Nice for 4 of us and the EI Saver fare return was €2700. I passed.

We must work in very different sectors, I guess. Not a single person I know in the finance or tech sectors benefit from contractually-guaranteed 'increments'. You get a pay increase if you are promoted or negotiate one.

The increments vs pay rise debate is all smoke and mirrors. They both result in the same thing - an increase in pay.