I had a conversation recently with a friend of mine about British Airways and the salary of crew members. (See his most awesome blog here). You see, the public are very misinformed about how much people actually get paid by British Airways. The most recent stats I’ve read state that the average salary of a crew member is £29,000 a year. That’s like, a most wicked salary! I’m going to pack in the day job and become a Trolly Dolly! (or equivalent of what they call the blokes, Trolly Wallys?)
Anyway, wait until you hear this… I actually have a friend who works with British Airways. He shall remain nameless for now… but let’s call him Bob. Bobs salary is, wait for it, 9k per year. 9k per year?!? How on earth do you live on 9k per year?!? So where is this bizarre 29k a year average coming from? For goodness sake, he surely can’t be the only one on this salary and therefore not really affecting the average?
Before I do some crazy maths let’s pretend there’s 2 camps of thought:
1. Generally there’s a nice even spread of salaries from 9k upwards to create this average. And probably most people in and around the 29k mark.
2. There can’t be that many people on a salary of 9k!
If you’re in camp 1, the calculation would probably go something like this…
If 25% of the people are, like Bob, on as low as 9k… 50% are in and around 29k… then the rest, i.e. 25% of the cabin crew, must be on as much as £49,000 a year… possibly more… Holy smokes! So what are they striking about?!?
Let’s do some more wild stats here, to create a balance. This time I’ll favour with camp 2. Let’s say 10% of the staff are on 9k, 60% are in and around 29k, and 30% would be long term and are above 29k. So what could they be potentially earning? … Let’s pretend we took a snapshot of 10 people to get to this average.
1 is on 9k
6 are on 29k
To get an average of 29k the total salaries must add up to 290k…
Out of the 7 people so far we have 183k
Therefore the remainder is 107k…
That’s 3 people making that are together earning 107k.
So, potentially you could have 1 person on 33k, another on 36k, and another on 39k…
Holy smokes folks! That’s still one hell of a salary and it could even be more because my figures are most likely wildly wrong! To go a step further, let’s just average out my 2 theories and say that in BA the better paid cabin crew must be on over 40k per year. Now let’s add even more fuel to the fire, that’s a base salary! So they get paid per flight on top of all that. That begs the question, what on earth is the deal with the spread?
I’m going to speculate. I think the problem with BA is in fact down to terribly written contracts at the beginning. Years ago they foolishly wrote something into the contracts similar to a promise that the staff would earn X amount of money/payrise each year etc etc. This probably happened before it was privatised. Now they are screwed because those people would have started on something like 9k a year, and are probably the people now are on about 40 – 50k+ a year. This has most likely been recognised by the key people, probably Willy Walsh, being the shrude business man he is. And therefore are trying to reduce costs and make it more profitable again… But, because of the older crews contracts the new people are also getting screwed with the same shit. Then getting tarred with the same brush by the media, and in turn, by the public.
So, there’s obviously a delimma, and I can already see the way it’s going to go. He’s going to mess up everyone in the place to start with, and get a proper wage structure in. Probably cause loads of staff to resign, including some of the new ones. Then he’ll revisit it all so that everyones wages are a little fairer. And save himself billions in the process.
I honestly have to say, it kinda makes sense. Don’t get me wrong, I can see why the BA staff are striking. BUT, and they won’t admit this, they’ve had it very good for quite a while. But the big “I’m gonna f*** you up” hammer has been due for a very long time.
To quote my friend Dan: “sounds fair, sometimes you just have to force redundancy on people, take a financial hit short term but it’ll be far better long term”.
Exactly. I won’t admit to my friend Bob, but have to say I do agree with the business logic here. And this happens more often in business than you think. When you don’t have the legal right to sack people, you just have to give them a little nudge to get out the door. It’s mean, but hey, it’s business. And if they don’t make money, you don’t have a job.
