Severn40

I wonder what the total financial saving is being made from this move.

hkskyline

Is staffing with London crew cheaper? Hong Kong salaries for these kinds of lower skilled service jobs are quite low.

nyjoe4

This is terribly sad. I have frequently taken the Airport Express with locally based BA crew on their way to their flight and continued with them to London Without exception, they have always been kind, thoughtful, hardworking and - most important - bilingual.

The letter received is appalling, but not dissimilar to many friends I have with BA being told in recent years that their position has been eliminated and that they need to reapply for their job. There is something seriously wrong with BA's corporate culture.

flygirl68

makrom

I get that there are commercial constraints that are hard to comprehend as outsider. What gets me though is doing it on such short notice and not even offering any assistance or chance of relocation. From what I experienced in similar situations, it isn't uncommon to offer the option of continued employment in another location. Out of social responsibility but not least because they waste fully trained staff with known track records.

BA6501

Were comments always disabled? Seems like they are now.

BA6501

This is absolutely disgusting and I am lost for words. I can't think of anything that can be done (e.g. MF/WW walkouts, etc) - the decision won't be overturned, and while a couple sites have picked up the story, this needs to be all over. Shocking, inhumane and speaks volumes about BA, not that many of us thought highly of the airline's HR practices to begin with.

BABenchley

Just disgusting and disrespectful to those who have put in years of hard work.

InsomniaBA

They were.

cupsandsaucers

funny you say inhumane (I agree). The author lists "human rights" as one of his 3 interests on LinkedIn.

13901

This post is reflective of my own opinion only, and is not representative of BA's strategy or point of view.

I get why this relentless push for cost-cutting is happening. I think there's a song that the strategists are dancing to when they tell us not to leave any stone unturned, and that song isn't "Money", but CCR's "Bad Moon Rising". I've held it as my opinion, for quite a while, that sooner or later this era (for the industry) of massive growth and huge profits is going to end. Too much offer, thinning yields and now fuel costs rising. Make hay whilst the sun's high, cut the dead branches and all that.

Before you ask, I know how this feels. My department went through a 30% cull, which in my role was almost 50%. I've sat in a room with HR showing us an org chart where there were half as many slots as we had now, and I too had to apply for my own job.

But.

This time, this is too hard to swallow. We have a story of offering the bare minimum when going through one of these slash & burn exercises. In my case, BA offered exactly what was offered by the law, not a day or dime more; but when the law, as is the Hong Kong case, is incredibly harsh from our European point of view, how is it ethical to "do the bare minimum"? This is what gets me, what infuriates me. HKG's ICC team numbered less than 100. I doubt that the financial impact of being more decent, more human, would've bankrupted us. Yet, BA did not give a toss. Firing people on the day they were meant to be working, on the spot, is harsh if it's done deservedly (gross misconduct, this sort of things); in this case, it's bloody shameful. It's stuff that perhaps even the chap from Sports Direct would find a bit too rich. Is this what we've become?

Yet, we seem to be doing this every time. I have seen only a couple of men standing up to this: I won't name them, but they are two real leaders who fought the redundancies one by one, especially when they made no sense in the long term; when forced, they refused to just use the standard letter "crafted" by the shameless and faceless legal team we have (the letter we've seen here is a template, the one I was given to let me know I was facing redundancy wasn't a lot nicer), and instead treated their teams as humans going through a hard time. These two guys are the exception, not the rule, and did that out of their own sense of decency and duty. No senior manager helped them as far as I'm aware.

This is what I find unacceptable, and I'm not the one: I get the reasons, I despise the method. And these methods are either endorsed or tolerated at Alex's table.

I will continue doing what I do, and I'll continue to feel pride in a job well done, in the esprit de corps with my peers and team members, and I'll keep feeling commitment to them, as well as our customers. But I've no faith in our top managers, no trust in them to deliver what's good for BA long term. I, and I'm sure many fellow colleagues will think the same, feel obliged to them only to deliver strictly what contract and basic rules of good manners require me to.

flatlander

If Cruz wants the level of industrial relations that the Tube has - not just strikes, but willingness for flexible working and acceptance of change - he can get them by treating people like this.

How's the Piccadilly Line going today?

rossmacd

Very sad and brutish indeed, but then again if I am travelling to HKG, I'll be on CX, not BA.

kaka

Howard Long

His Linkedin profile appears to have disappeared. A real shame, not only did I skip lunch today, being a W1A fan I was quite looking forward to an entertaining read.