traveller5 you must be very well connected indeed! Especially considering Willie isn't even in charge yet, hasn't been in the airline for five minutes and despite all the other things he has to get a grasp of, he already knows the workings of cabin crew allowences and how he is going to change them. He may be the CEO but he still has the board to answer to as well.
Maybe you can use your connections to answer the following questions for us?
1). Firstly, what does he plan on doing about the small consequence of our contracts? If you read our Industrial Agreement (Allowences) it doesn't mention anything about being provided meals. It says we will be provided with an allowence equivalent to the cost of a meal in the hotel in local currency. So that would be the first hurdle for him. He would need to change our contract (all 13,000 odd of us).
2). The 'meal in hotel' system seems to be based on the scenario that we spend all our duty in a hotel. What about when we are on the aircraft and our meal allowence times are triggered? Are you saying that shorthaul crew operating there-and-backs will get no allowences as they won't have access to a restaurant?
Changes are ineviatable and some will even be welcome. But everything is relative. Crew from loads of other airlines would LOVE to see us fall flat on our face and lose our conditions. BA is not going to adopt CitiExpress conditions overnight, because the operation is totally different and they would have to seek the agreement of the 13,000 cabin crew to change their contracts. But that does not mean that we are not open to negotiation . At the end of the day we all want BA to be a success and to still have our jobs in 10, 20 or 30 years time.
I can remember when I first came to BA from BMI. I thought it was like a holiday camp and would nearly fall over in fits of laughter when the crew that had been there for years would say how much harder BA was working them. They didn't believe me when I would tell them about the days we had at BMI. Since then, things have slowly got a little harder at BA (but i'm still loving it) and I think will continue to slowly get more harder still. But as our days at BA slowly get harder the days at the likes of bmi or virgin or citiexpress will get harder still.