+1 eat-more-cheese
While I agree, they were given the contract - I think they've shot themselves in the foot now everyone realises just how much they've been earning - tbh a bit like the Printers in the 80's as said further above.
Or even Firemen in the UK where everyone assumes they've a second job, or Coppers as we all think they retire on a fat pension in their late 40's / early 50's.
But then most people don't realise "you've never had it so good", until it ends...
Doesn't bother me, as I don't fly
Air travel is not the problem. In terms of transport, shipping cheap goods around the world's oceans and people holidaying on luxury liners is[i] properly environmentally damaging. The CO2 we as individuals introduce on our annual holiday is a tiny fraction. So let's keep things in perspective.
Well if you want to put it in perspective..
Imagine that you make one intercontinental trip per year by plane. How much energy does that cost?
A Boeing 747-400 with 240 000 litres of fuel carries 416 passengers about 8 800 miles (14 200 km). And fuel’s calorific value is 10 kWh per litre. (We learned that in Chapter 3.) So the energy cost of one full-distance round trip on such a plane, if divided equally among the passengers, is
2 × 240 000 litre/ 416 passengers× 10 kWh/litre ≈ 12 000 kWh per passenger
If you make one such trip per year, then your average energy consumption per day is
12 000 kWh /365 ≈ 33 kWh/day
14 200 km is a little further than London to Cape Town (10 000 km) and
London to Los Angeles (9000km), so I think we’ve slightly overestimated
the distance of a typical long-range intercontinental trip; but we’ve also overestimated the fullness of the plane, and the energy cost per person is more if the plane’s not full. Scaling down by 10 000 km/14 200 km to get an estimate for Cape Town, then up again by 100/80 to allow for the plane’s being 80% full, we arrive at 29 kWh per day. For ease of memorization, I’ll round this up to 30 kWh per day.
Let’s make clear what this means. Flying once per year has an energy
cost slightly bigger than leaving a 1 kW electric fire on, non-stop, 24 hours a day, all year.
Source: http://www.withouthotair.com/
Of course plenty more people fly short haul, but at least it gives a starting figure for energy consumption.
As I recall it, the nature of at least one of the spanish strikes was this:
1) ATCOs get on a contract with a decent basic salary and high overtime
2) Staffing cuts make constant long overtime a neccesity to keep the service going
3) ATCOs work a tonne of overtime and end up getting paid a lot
4) People say "ZOMG, ATCOs get paid too much, let's cut their negotiated overtime rate, but not hire more ATCOs to cover the work, making overtime still a neccesity"
5) ATCOs say bite me
Seems like there might be people in this thread that know better than I do though? But if that's accurate, then they'd be absolutely right to strike IMO.
best bet is to get the monkeys hooked on nicotine and withold their cigarettes if they dont work
Ok rather than listen to the new on sky where people can barely write there name, let alone put the 3rd biggest city of a country correctly on a map, I think that you people should have a read at el Pais.
It is the spanish newspaper of reference, and I am very confident that you will learn a lot of interesting things.
First being that they don't strike for the salary, but for the sickness allowance.
Second is that they are not actually striking any more. They are just all on leave. For sickness...
They should have their knackers stapled to their seats and told to get on with it.
As far as I'm concerned (and I'm probably biased as their actions directly affect my income)regardless of how many hours they are contracted to work versus how many hours of overtime they work, they are still on an obscene amount of cash for a Spanish worker. The Canaries now have over 30% unemployment, so you can imagine the amount of sympathy the Spanish ATC's get from the local community here, especially when their actions disrupt what tourism remains in these difficult times, making things even harder to scrape a living for those that remain.
/rant off
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