I note in todays Telegraph:
The airline [BA] employs 47,000 people but has been dogged by absenteeism with staff reporting sick 17 days a year compared with the average of seven days. Union sources said the absenteeism was due to working conditions.
So. BA staff are in the habit of taking an extra two weeks holiday a year compared to other workers. On top of being in the rareified club of final salary pension workers who also enjoy extensive staff travel and unionised job security.
I see no realistic way for BA to drag itself out of this mire.
Other than go bust. Imagine it. They wind the firm up on a Tuesday and then rise it phoneix like from the ashes on a Wednesday. Everything contracted out on the ground to competing firms. New hires recruited on a single union no-strike contract only in essential areas of operations such as cabin crew and flightdeck and engineering.
No final salary pension commitments. The dead half of management not rehired and most deliciously those damn militant baggage chuckers and bus drivers out on their ear into the real world.
The BA brand could have been sold to a holding company along with the slots. The aircraft lease holders would have had to held their assets unused overnight whilst the old BA died and the new BOAC was reborn looking for a whole load of aircraft, a brand and some slots...
This cannot be impossible to engineer surely? Sell off the right to the brand and sell the slots and sell the other essential bits to a ' holding company ' then go bust, then start a New BA and buy back the forementioned.
Got to be a way of slashing 50% of costs in my book.
BEN