Agent69

Tenable - yes, efficient - no

FlyerTalker39574

Not perfectly efficient, but not really a problem.

surryson

Taking Government job retention money whilst threatening to put staff on notice of dismissal, then offering to rehire a proportion of them on new Ts&Cs if there’s no agreement, is scandalous for an airline who haven’t even come up with anything innovative for thousands of loyal frequent flyers.

sufficiently concerned over their inability to restart operations yet failing to apply the same principles to frequent flyer loyalty rather sums things up.

JerseyPilot

Not to mention the new contract they’re proposing to put Cabin Crew on is effectively a Zero Hours contract. This needs to be widely publicised. The airline is behaving like Sports Direct and wants to be considered a Full Service airline? Do me a favour.

MFCC

I've not seen the new contract so if you could expand on this it'd be much appreciated.

Dan72

Sadly this is the type of business re-organisation that many companies who have benefited from government support will be employing, eg hospitality sector putting staff on reduced hours contracts, removing long established supplementary payments for working anti-social hours etc. I don't like it, but in some situations it will be the only option if jobs are to be saved.

NB I don't see that it would be any more palatable, if BA had come up with something innovative for loyal frequent travellers.

Bearface

BA had “support cabin crew” in the 1980s/1990s. They were employed on a casual basis with no basic pay and were just paid for the flights they worked.

Mixed Fleet is still too expensive for BA. I wonder what the new fleet will be called. As ex-crew, this saddens me. Most of my former colleagues have been flying for years and are very dedicated to their jobs.

crazy8534

I am devastated to think of so many BA staff losing their jobs, but some of the thinking around this seems totally unrealistic.

There are 30 million americans claiming unemployment benefit. 3.3 million claimed in 1 week- 5x higher than the previous highest number ever recorded.
1 million people applied for universal credit in the UK in a 2 week period at the end of March.
The economy is now facing its deepest crisis in centuries.
Yes, hopefully some will be re-employed as lockdown eases but how quickly is that going to happen?

The effect on airlines is existential.
Yes, WW staff are excellent. Yes, it will be sad to see so many go. Yes, BA staff deserve to be among the best paid in the business.
But what are the unions going to threaten BA with now? Strikes?

It's over.
Single fleet is best way forward now.
I'd rather see 12k lose their jobs than 42k.

rockflyertalk

This is why we need a new strategy for world economics. What once was, is not going to easily solve this. This is beyond a 9/11 or a black Monday in the 80’s.

Unless governments wake up to a new dawn, a complete new way of doing and thinking then this will be painful for many years for everyone. This is unlike anything anyone has seen in a century but even then it’s not comparable due to population increases and the rise of global economic affects.

Anyway I’m digressing.

JFX1764

Not seen any communication about this? Was it in today's conference call?

Bear96

So the staffing changes wouldn't be "scandalous" if only BA had made an improvement to its FF program?

Sorry if I misunderstanding; just trying to connect those dots.

?

13901

A friend of my Mrs, who's not in the Union, took part in the Teams call. It was basically just a verbal edition of the letter; why they do it and so on. They've also heard about the zero-hour contract but I guess is more a crewmour at the moment. This would be way worse than even Ryanair or EasyJet's contracts. Potentially one could make more money on Universal Credit or any other job than with this; retention would be borderline impossible, leaving aside the situation here in 2020.

northeastflyer

I've been told by a current employee that UK call centres have to lose 219 heads between Manchester, Newcastle and Waterside disruption team. These figures also impact upon and include Customer Relations and Social Media. I know the restructuring affects many many more staff, but the call centres (and related teams) are the staff who customers rely on initially when any disruption occurs, such as with the current Covid situation. Just a shame all round.
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Confus

A friend at Head Office has been told their ‘required contribution’ is 1 in 3 have to go, with the same wholescale ripping up of T&C for those who stay as detailed above. Brutal hardly begins to cover it.

McG

Are a lot of the UK call centre staff working from home just now?

If they are, I would have hoped that BA might have seen the benefits to this and to the possibility of reducing costs by moving to this way of working on a more permanent basis and no longer paying large sums in rent for office space rather than arbitrarily reducing headcount.