OK… Let’s see… I understand, guys and gals, that you have a stressing and very important job to do.
I understand that, therefore, you have reasonably short working hours (the last thing you want to have is a tired, worn-out controller in the tower) and fantastic salaries (roughly $470,000 / year, in a country which right now is undergoing the mother of all recessions).
So, you are all employed by AENA (half-private/half-governmental company), and the Spanish government is planning to get rid of its stake in it, privatizing it completely. I can also more or less understand that you might be fretting about perhaps losing your privileges and working conditions if you are thrust into the cold, uncaring world of private enterprise.
But I would say that those are concerns best served by discussing them with your managers and (ultimately) with whatever representatives from the government you might have over there, rather than engaging in a fucking wildcat strike that has stranded more than 300.000 people in airports all over Europe (I am one of those affected, I must say in the interest of disclosure) and has screwed up with air traffic control in half of Western Europe, you DICKHEADS!
(In the end, the Spanish government has done something that had not been done since the end of the Franco days in 1975: They declared a state of emergency, which means that air traffic controllers and other people considered essential for the functioning of the nation are put directly under military authority, and if they were to refuse to go back to work, they would be considered as having directly disobeyed justified military orders, which would send them to military jail).
Allow me to say, dickhead controllers, that the main victims of all this brouhaha are going to be YOU. You have lost whatever little sympathy the average Spaniard might have had for you. They are not going to lift a finger in protest if the Spanish government “pulls a Reagan” and fires off the lot of you (although I think it won’t do it, anyway; I understand that it might be too complicated, legally speaking, to fire them all).
Gragh. Grumble, grumble, fucking lost the whole fucking day in the fucking airport. In Amsterdam. I don’t even want to begin imagining how it might be in Spain >.<
P.S.: Oh, and to add delicious insult to injury, the baggage services at Schiphol managed to do something that had NEVER happened to me before: They performed the feat of actually managing to lose my luggage with me having never been in the air at all :rolleyes: )