from the economist.com
T is always a bad omen when a business calls in the police to protect its staff from their customers. So when a cordon of bobbies formed in front of the British Airways check-in desk at Heathrow's Terminal 4 on the afternoon of July 21st, passengers who had been waiting for several hours—or in some cases several days—to board flight BA223 to Washington, DC, sensed that something was up. They included aposse of irate American golfers, and your unfortunate correspondent.
Officially, things were getting back to normal after a short, unofficial strike by around 250 BA check-in and sales staff, who walked out last weekend in protest at the introduction of an electronic clocking-on system. The staff say the system will enable managers to fiddle with shift patterns. Maybe it will. But it will also allow managers to use staff more efficiently and to put a stop to skiving that currently goes undetected. The walk-out obliged BA to cancel around 520 flights and divert some to other airports.
BA may well be in the right in the clocking-on dispute. But its reaction to the strike, which combined duplicity and incompetence, was abysmal. Its website and help-line assured passengers throughout the day that normal service had been resumed—an illusion that was dispelled as soon as they drew up in the airport car-park. Thousands of people were being held outside to prevent a crush, and most had to squat on their suitcases. A couple of marquees had been erected. Harassed staff distributed sandwiches and drinks. The airport chaplain wandered around looking even more forlorn than the passengers.
Inside, it was worse: the sandwiches were free only for travellers who had been waiting overnight. BA223, it transpired, departed after only a relatively short delay, but it left what seemed like most of its passengers behind: by the time they were admitted to the terminal the schedule and crews' rosters obliged it to take-off. So it went half-empty. Then they were left to stew for hours, as bucks were passed, the police were called and management hid. Eventually they were told to collect accommodation vouchers outside, which turned out not to exist. Then they were packed off to hotels, unsure when they would get to go home or on their holidays.
Most of those in the queue and the car-park bore all this stoically; some even seemed to be enjoying the un-British camaraderie and the chance to exhibit a little Blitz spirit. But nobody was keen to fly BA again, or to recommend it.
Like other airlines, BA is still recovering from the combined squeeze of September 11th, the economic downturn, SARS, the Iraq war and the march of the low-cost fliers. It has led the way for other European carriers in, for instance, adopting the low-cost carriers' web-booking systems to offer a range of flexible fares. At off-peak periods on short-haul routes, BA is sometimes as cheap as the low-cost competition.
The clocking-in system is a tiny element in its survival plan, which also involves broad restructuring and deep job- and cost-cuts, and had seemed to be working. In the past two years BA has slashed one in four jobs—about 13,000 in all—without a whiff of labour trouble. Last summer, side-effects of this were showing up, with a shortage of ground staff routinely delaying departures at Gatwick by one hour most afternoons. There have been some warning signs this year, with a high rate of sickness causing the airline to hire in aircraft and crew to fill gaps. Rising absenteeism is a sure sign of stress in an organisation that is contracting. But the big mistake was to introduce a new working practice at the start of the summer quarter when the airline makes all its money.
The previous chief executive, Bob Ayling, never really recovered from a strike by cabin crew in the summer of 1997, which hit the airline's reputation and profits very badly, although he lasted nearly three more years. Today's tougher market means the stakes are higher and the game is quicker. The airline's shares fell 5% at one point on July 23rd after the current chief executive, Rod Eddington, observed that the strikes could have cost tens of millions of pounds in revenue.