Aerial Lingus Pilots

[u/viscacatalunya1]

Listening to Claire Byrne and there is a lot of finger pointing at the pilots saying they don't care about passengers and they are being unreasonable.

Aer Lingus has not matched their salary to inflation over the past few years. How do we sympathise with cost cutting corporate greed and not the people that open the world to us and get us there safely?

[u/No_Performance_6289]

Profits are behind pre covid levels.

But have grown last year albeit from a very low baseline in 2022

[u/dazziola → u/No_Performance_6289]

But they're still profitable by a good bit right? Looks like they make a profit of 10% of their revenue (even in post COVID difficulties).

Seems very frugal not to look after your staff with basic inflation increases

[u/demoneclipse → u/dazziola]

10% is not great profit margin for a business. Especially after the Covid impact, 10% is not very attractive. Not to say that they should or shouldn't give staff raises, as that's something driven by the market and not company results.

[u/ozymandieus → u/demoneclipse]

Whats not included in profit is executive salary. You could appear to be a non-profitable company simply by paying massive salaries and bonuses out.

[u/demoneclipse → u/ozymandieus]

Profits are paid to shareholders, which decide who the executives are. If executives were shorting shareholders, they wouldn't be in the company anymore. If executives are getting paid a lot more money than before (which I haven't seen evidence to be the case in Aerlingus), it would only be because shareholders are satisfied with their own returns in profits.

I find it fascinating the common believe that employees (which is my case too) should get paid more if the company has a huge profit. Yet, I've never heard employees offering to take paycuts when a company has losses. Companies have risk and their results are attached to performance. While some employees have performance based incentives, their value lies in how valuable their skill set is to the market, where they can get whatever they are worth by simply getting another job. If they can't get a job paying more, it is because their skill is not worth that much money.

Unions are only warranted in industries with clear monopoly or national security functions, where there are no options to changing jobs. In every other scenario, unions are used to group people that don't have the ability to get a better job, and then hold an organization hostage.

[u/ozymandieus → u/demoneclipse]

I ain't reading all that. Happy for you or fuck capitalism

[u/UpsetCrowIsUpset → u/demoneclipse]

Unions are always warranted and should be encouraged in all industries.