TopBunk - I dont think we are as far apart as you suggest - when, for example is T5 due to start? Some years hence?
If we agree that that is the case then surely, important though it is, the approach to work processes that accompany that move and the efficiencies that are to be gained from it are "gradualist". Hence my saying that the approach to work efficiencies with the staff groups concerned - ramp, bagagge services, dispatch ground handling, terminal staff etc etc will be "gradual" - it will happen as T 5 looms. That is not going to happen either this year or next, however.
W squared has said that he likes it when Ryanair and he are mentioned in the same sentance, and that they are THE competition to beat in the productivity/costbase stakes. OK, you can argue they serve a very different market but the techniques of personel management that have made them so succesful on a financial level are just as applicable to BA.
Sure, this is a pilot RUMOUR network, and I dont have a sworn statement from WW to say - "this is THE plan for my first hundred days" - but my source is very credible.
Ryanair has stripped swathes of cost out of the business. Many of the planned actions mentioned in my first post are but to replicate their way of doing business with their pilots in BA, a way WW is said to admire, which he does because he sees it as cost-effective, and, in BA's case "long overdue".
WW's response to Aer Lingus's problems was to reinvent them as a low cost, on-line majority booking carrier. That was the technique, which involved big cost cuts early on.
OK, BA is a full service carrier, but that does not impede any of the events WW plans, mentioned in my first post, from taking place.
He knows, it is said, that BALPA is the weakest of the unions he faces. This is a union who would have ZERO public support if a strike were called - all he would have to do is publish the salary scales for BA pilots.
This is a union which has been very effectively "ground-down" in an ongoing war of attrition between its own BA Flight Ops departmental managers and the union reps - look at the Attendance Management Process and its effects on the reps involved - look at the unions failure over post-flight bus routings- -look at the muddled ballot over pensions for new starters.
It is so easy too, to "nobble" the leading playersin BALPA. If they have any accrued pesion rights worth a darn, all you have to whisper is -
"go ahead punk, make my day"
i.e. strike and you'll be the first to be sacked and you can kiss your hard-earned pension goodbye.
How else was the ludicrously-worded 'ballot that was not a ballot' about pensions for new starters put out to BA pilots recently and why? The question on the ballot was so indecipherable that no clear result could ever be forthcoming from it, and this was quite deliberate.
WW sees big, easy savings from BALPA and he is going to get them. It will serve "pour encourager les autres", and BALPA will be unable and, ultimately, unwilling to resist. If they weren't going to strike to save a Final Salary Pension for new starters they were never going to strike at all - RE knows that, WW knows that and, in their hearts, BALPA knows it too.
The source says he is looking at ANY measure that takes BA closer to, and ideally way beyond, the magic 10% operating margin. Nothing will block that from being achieved and any thing that will facilitate it will be looked at and implemented as long as it doesn't lead to melt down.
BALPA, WW is said to believe, is a toothless talking shop, that acts a vendor of financial services to its members or as an "accused's best friend" at the many disciplinary-style hearings against its own flight crew that BA has these days - witness the Absence Management Programme.
I accept this cant have the force of a signed statement, but WW has people who know him well from Aer Lingus and they like to talk.
As others have said, it will be interesting.