If anyone plans to play the subsidiary game and join OS, bear in mind that you will be forever reminded where you stand in the operation.
- You will be expected to contribute to the bottom line of the parent – naturally.
- You will be expected to take the hits along with the rest of the BA staff in the lean times.
- You will not share in the spoils of BA’s success in the good times, because you are only a subsidiary. Talk to anyone in the engineering offshoots.
- You will have the pleasure of enjoying your £10 M&S voucher at Christmas when the BA people within your company get to bank hundreds if not thousands as their slice of the BA profit share.
The reason why BA want to keep clear blue water between the main operation and subsidiaries is (according to its former Ops Director) because “it is cheaper and easier to get rid of staff from a subsidiary if the need arises”. Nice!
Would have like to see them try it though. Not so easy to dispose of the riff raff if you cant find someone to give it away to.
As for the training cost argument, it never failed to amaze BACon staff that the company believed that it was better to train and type-rate new pilots from scratch into a BA subsidiary and accept that they would be scooped up by their competitors; BMI, Virgin, Easy, TF etc, rather than to use the subsidiary as a training ground for the main company. How many other industries work like this? Oh how BMI regional must have chuckled when they found that they could pick up 20+ fully rated pilot for nothing simply because the parent company BA showed absolutely no interest in giving these people any chance of progressing within their own ever shrinking operation or redeploment within the group.
Oh and when they do close you down, mind you don’t get trampled when the leeches with ties to the mother-ship scramble for the exits. The early signs are when a few senior managers make their excuses and slither back to HQ were their talents are needed for “urgent important projects”. Suddenly, you will realise that the only managers left are the home grown variety who will suddenly find they are having to deal with the redundancies.
Meanwhile, those who slithered back to Waterworld will have forgotten all about what was just a bad dream.
Only slightly bitter of Bristol
Last edited by biddedout; 6th Feb 2008 at 16:58.