In the current climate it is hardly surprising that news about forthcoming job losses is a fairly regular event.
But it never prepares you for the situation, and it would appear that Heathrow Airport is next in line for a round of job losses that will affect thousands of people.
The job losses will number around 1,700 in all, and they have been decided by British Airways. The name of the company should not come as a big surprise as BA has been struggling for months to control losses. The current recession has meant that many people have ditched ideas for flying off on foreign holidays. A larger proportion of people have decided to stay at home this year to save the pennies, which is an understandable route to take.
But of course this has had a huge impact on many airlines, which have found negotiating their way through the recession extremely difficult. The cuts from British Airways at Heathrow Airport are just one more sign of this harsh reality.
All of the jobs are reported to be for cabin crew positions. Voluntary redundancy has been brought into play, so many will get a reasonable pay off. But of course this does not qualify as the best outcome of the situation unless someone wants to leave anyway. No doubt a small proportion of crew members will be pleased at the turn of events. But for the most part it will come as a shock to lose their job at this point in a recession.
Some businesses are still recruiting but the fact remains that jobs are much harder to find at the moment. Some cabin crew are losing hours rather than jobs, while a thousand people will leave altogether. But it equates to losing 1,700 workers in total if all were employed on a full time basis.
Of course the news from BA is that this won’t have any effect at all on the services they provide. But if there are going to be fewer cabin crew on each flight, it stands to reason that passengers will indeed have to wait longer to be served.
Some say the job cuts point to desperation from the company to make any changes they possibly can to save money. Profit margins in this industry are far from good anyway, and a recession clearly has a disastrous effect on that situation.
So what will happen in the future? The man in charge of British Airways, chief executive Willie Walsh, has stated that the company must take whatever measures it can to stall the flow of losses the company is currently experiencing. And since we are talking in multimillion pound figures here, he does have a point.
Is this one of those situations where any change to preserve the future of a company will be painful? It seems it will. But opinion on whether this is the right move to make is definitely divided. And the cabin crew members are definitely far from happy.