Management Style

Since the last "Certified (Shafting) Agreement" we have seen the management restructures, business department amendments and supervisory realignments. 

ATC was essentially immune from the majority of these restructures; well for the first few years of 'fiddling'.

Team Leaders became operational supervisors.  Operational Supervisors have since become Air Traffic Controller Line Managers or ALMs for short, well except for the majority of Regional Towers where the Unit Tower Managers jobs still 'exist'.

We all acknowledge that there are not enough ATCs manning operational positions, this gives the workforce a significant bargaining advantage if we chose to utilise that point.

At a time of short staffing, brought about by ongoing insufficient staff planning, SDE wastage/duplication of duties, we then implement the ALM structure to further deplete the operational ATC resource.

Approximately 90 ALMs are now performing supervisory and management roles; a significant increase in management when compared to the OS structure.  Of these 90 or so people over 65% came from the previous operational staffing pool, thus we have reduced our console coverage by about another 50 people.

Lets leave out the manner in which the ALMs were employed; that's a whole separate topic.

The are at least 7 people that have left or who are leaving the company that didn't apply for ALM jobs; previously they were Operational Supervisors; they are entitled to Voluntary Redundancy.  There are another group currently fighting for Voluntary Redundancy instead of being redeployed back to the boards or other non operational roles that they argue are not the same type of job (what not doing ATC, supervising ATC staff, not working shift work, not working weekends etc. fair enough difference in roles one would think).

So we could end up with 15 or so people leave the organisation, with pay-outs, because of the ideologies of the individuals involved in proceeding with the structure; even though they may have had advice that Voluntary Redundancy "was likely" for anyone wishing to pursue that option.

We have seen 'fraud' allegations and disciplinary action taken against individuals for leaving 30 minutes early with permission from their immediate supervisors (ie no substantive cost).  Yet when management waste potentially millions of dollars because of ideology, then it's called a business decision, not fraud.