BA asking staff to work for free

www.britishairways.com

British Airways spokeswoman Kirsten Millard said on Tuesday that British Airways has asked thousands of employees to go without pay for up to four weeks.

In an email sent to all its staff, the carrier offered employees unpaid leave for periods of one to four weeks, noting that they had the option of working during that time. In the UK, BA has a workforce of more than 40,000.

In May, BA posted record annual losses of £400 million.

The airline’s boss claimed at the time that the industry was seeing “absolutely no signs of recovery.”

BA’s chief executive, Willie Walsh, said: “I’m 30 years in this business and I’ve never seen anything like this. This is by far the biggest crisis the industry has ever faced.”

A spokesman for one of the largest unions in the UK stressed that the employees were not able to afford to working without pay for a month.

Ciaran Naidoo, a Unite union spokesman, said: “It’s all well and good for Willie Walsh to say he’s prepared to work for free when he earns four times in a month what they do in a year.”

Thanks to edition.cnn.com for the above quotes, for more information on this article please visit their website.

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