Not for this first time, I find myself in complete agreement with Pontious.
When Mrs Roobarb told me yesterday that 18,000 jobs would be going at BA, I thought right, at long last Bonzer Rod has taken the bit between his teeth and we’re off. Finally we’ve taken the problem by the throat and decided on clear direct action to turn this company around.
Unfortunately, she’d got it wrong and so has Rod. The figure of 1800 is a sop to the company’s critics in the city and elsewhere, and the ‘across the board’ nature is a sop to the vulnerable staff groupings. Such action is woefully inadequate, and by attacking the front line customer service personnel and operational functions will directly impact on the quality of the service we provide to our customers.
Desk Pilot, you say that your colleagues are seeing passenger numbers fall whilst pilots and cabin crew numbers increase – there is a very good reason for that. Because of the company’s failure to plan for the future in the last 20 years, we are having to recruit heavily to replace retiring staff in a market where such people are at a premium. An entirely avoidable position. The reason that passenger numbers are falling is because the company told all the economy passengers that they were no longer wanted, and the company decided to buy small aeroplanes so that we
cannot fly any more passengers. An entirely avoidable position. We are also having to address the crass policy of the Ailing one which contracted out all essential functions whilst developing Feng Shui Marketing and Aromatic IT departments in house in a brand new corporate palace built on a rubbish dump. This failure to focus on the mission has left us with twice the number of the wrong staff. An entirely avoidable position.
The assertion that somehow all departments must share the grief is simply wrongheaded. Why must we cut down on ESSENTIAL engineering, dispatch, customer service and crew numbers, when they are PRECISELY the people who we need to reinforce the quality of the product to the premium passengers that we seek to fill our toy aeroplanes? Why am I told that we mustn’t point the finger of blame at individual departments, when if those people had worked for the Lord Protector, they would be swinging from the Compass Centre by their own mouse?
How did we end up with hundreds of nefarious management staff in Waterworld, or more frequently working from home, for whom there is little structure to their employment and still less performance accountability? Having spoken to some of these individuals, it is clear that they are so disconnected from the customer that they cannot hope to deliver a product that our customers would want to buy. That’s how we ended up with ‘deli-bags’. In the vacuum of Waterworld, the management is simply incapable of maintaining an accurate view of the market and our position in it. Such decisions must be taken by those who know our customers, those who work with hundreds of them every day.
I’m sorry that people will necessarily lose their jobs, but we simply do not have the luxury of keeping some of the ridiculous job functions that you can read about in the middle pages of Pravda. Many of these people do not see BA as a lifetime career, and so will simply go on to ‘Director of Aromatherapy, Amalgamated Widgets plc’, it’s just another job to them. Motivated by nothing other than meeting their nominated targets for the year to achieve their personal bonus, these people run unhindered and unsupervised with little interest in the commercial impact of their efforts, and escape the consequences financially. Rest assured that they will not’ feel the pain’.
For the benefit of those who have committed themselves to this company and have invested all of their professional life in its future, it’s time for us to leave this disastrous management experiment behind and return to profitability. We need to provide the best possible product, safely, smoothly, on time, and with their bags. Anybody who is not directly involved in that task should form part of that 1800, and should make up the bulk of the thousands of others who are riding the gravy train at our expense.
