If you are at an 9 or lower it would be a much easier call to make.
Pay is based on experience (time). Doesn’t matter where you work like it does here (except Sydney gets like $1,800 extra per year)
36 hour work week. Or 3 day weekend every other week.
5 weeks of leave with the ability to earn up to 7 by working outside of normal shift hours (guessing mids).
Overtime cannot be forced.
Citizenship is the main draw I think. Make a real go of it. 3 years to apply for permanent residency I think it was.
They have sabbatical programs to reduce pay for a while and take 3,6,9,12 months off but are short so it supposedly doesn’t get approved.
Ability to maybe transfer after a few years. No pay change so probably rare. All of a sudden small towers in BFE might be a nice way to go out.
Cons:
Pay is lower than our high level facilities. $137,000 usd.
You must get your own private health insurance until a permanent resident.
Pretty high taxes I believe I read.
No return home flights paid for.
No housing allowance.
From what I can gather as well:
The OT is voluntary and if you are on the "yes" list, you can be allocated 5 shifts in a 3 month period where you are on call. These shifts seem to be set in advance, so basically I think if one shift is scheduled min staffing on a Saturday night, they can schedule you to be on call. Once again, this is voluntary, and you can volunteer for less than 5 shifts every 3 months as well. If you are not called in on the day you're allocated, you get 4 hours of pay for being on call. If you do get called in and have to work the OT, you get 1.9x your standard pay rate.
Their holiday pay is 1.97x your pay if you actually work the holiday. If you are off on the holiday but work an in lieu of day, you only get paid 0.79 of 1 shift's pay.
Looks like annual use or lose carryover is 288 hours if you are a M-F day worker, or 388 hours if you're a sever day shift worker. It's hard to tell if there's 2 classifications of atc or not where some get to work M-F while the others have to work nights and weekends. I'm reading this from their contract which also covers staff support and some other positions so I would assume that all actual atc are considered 7 day shift workers and would get to carryover the 388 hours.
PPL: For the primary caregiver (I presume the mothers) they get 18 weeks of PPL. However, they are required to take 6 weeks immediately preceding the expected birth date and 6 weeks after the actual birth date. For the secondary caregiver, they currently get 11 weeks of PPL but that increases to 14 weeks starting in March of 2026 and 18 weeks starting in March 2027. They can also opt to take half pay and stretch the PPL out to 36 weeks.
Long service leave: After 10 years of work, you are entitled to 3 months of leave to be granted in blocks of at least 7 calendar days at a time.
If any part of your shift touches between the hours of 0001 and 0459, you are credited with 2 hours of night shift leave for every shift worked. Can accrue a max of 72 hours of this leave per year.
Their busiest tower is Sydney, which by comparison to here runs a similar amount of traffic to FLL, so it's essentially a level 8.
