And as I see it, denial is not a solution.
There’s no mistaking the facts here. We’re trying to bail out the Titanic with a shot glass.
This thing hit a fairly large iceberg over a year ago and has been steadily taking on water. There has been an effort to patch the gaping hole with vague and inaccurate parchment, and that’s about all.
It’s going under. When you put a big hole in the bottom of a boat, and if the boat is sitting in water, and if the water is deeper than the height of the boat, the boat will sink due to gravity.
The Federal Court or the Federal Government, depending on who arrives at the scene of the sinking first, is about to take complete control of the helm and steer what’s left of the hulking thing into their own iceberg, the end of mandatory retirement for the entire federally regulated sector. They’ll just put the entire crew out of its misery.
Yet so far there has not been any statement at all in any of the membership newsletters, unless we missed one, with regard to the potential magnitude of the liability that the membership is under. For some reason nobody is being shown the readout on the depth sounder.
By anybody’s standard from what has gone before, we have to be looking, potentially, at 50 percent of 20 million on the low end.
The big question – is there a legal obligation to advise the membership of the potential liability and to give them realistic odds of being on the hook for it. Is there anything in the constitution that mandates that kind of disclosure?
As the next 150 complainants move through the procedural hoops to the inevitable result, let’s assume that the Federally ordered end to mandatory retirement comes in the Fall at the hands of Parliament. In the meantime, for all pilots wishing to continue their employment past 60 in order to maximize their years of service for pension purposes, (and data shows about 2900 pilots require that), the end result, if current events are any indicator, will be that the membership will ultimately be paying for half of all the back wages of all the complainants and all of the pilots who file a formal complaint from when this all started several years ago, right up until the procedural end.
The iceberg was in clear view well over a year ago – at 20 knots, the iceberg was on the radar at a range of over 175,000 miles, which is well off the charts. That’s one big hummer of an iceberg.
Unless it’s buried in an obscure folder somewhere, the only note, so far, seems to have said, steady as she goes, no sweat, the damage is minor, this isn’t really happening, all of you down in steerage, please remain seated, the water will not rise above your chins, tilt your heads back a little and just breathe normally, anyway there are only enough lifeboats for the guys who voted.
Thanx Grandpa. Now stop biting.
Have a great night!
