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August 14, 2005
BA woes reinforce need to handle terminations thoughtfully
One cannot help but feel a bit bad for British Airways and their 100,000 passengers stranded around the globe during the carrier's labor problems this week. The direct source of the problems was not the unions representing BA's workers, but rather workers at the caterer Gate Gourmet, who struck when 670 of their colleagues were fired last Wednesday. In a show of support, most other Gate Gourmet employees walked out, as did another 1,000 airport workers employed by other companies, BA among them. The strikes resulted in BA grounding its global fleet the next day.
Much of the media attention has been focused on BA and the plights of stranded passeners. The part of the story that has been largely overlooked is what started the whole chain of events: Gate Gourmet apparently doing a poor job in terminating its 670 employees. A spokeman for the Transport and General Workers' Union, which represents much of Heathrow airport's ground workers, said people were fired with three minutes notice over a public address system, and some where fired while out on maternity leave. Gate Gourmet has been relatively quiet on their side of the story, except for a posting on their website, in which they explain the 670 employees were "...regrettably dismissed on Wednesday due to an un-balloted work stoppage at the Heathrow South catering facility. This action was taken reluctantly and only after repeated requests for the employees to return to work and a number of warnings that continued disruption would lead to dismissals."
As with most labor disputes, each side has a different interpretation of what occured, but the situation is a good reminder to communicators of two points:
1) Terminations for any reason must be carefully planned out with the utmost respect for the affected employees. Managers themselves should deliver the news in person and should get whatever support is needed beforehand to handle those difficult discussions with compassion, candor and clarity.
2) Companies must have a solid internal communications infrastructure in place to reach front-line employees immediately -- and a crisis is no time to uncover deficiencies in this area. BA's growing public relations problem has been fueled by stories of customer service agents giving wrong information to frustrated passengers, or more often, having absolutely no information to convey at all. It will be interesting to see what they learn from this experience -- unfortunately, that learning has come at the expense of its customers.
Posted by Christopher at August 14, 2005 11:58 AM
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