BRITISH Airways staff have been urged to go without pay for up to a month to help the airline's battle for survival.
Willie Walsh, its chief executive, has written to the 40,000-strong workforce with a plea for volunteers to work unpaid or go on unpaid leave.
They include some 240 people employed at BA's engineering centre at Glasgow airport, and up to 14 custom
er service managers in Scotland.
The remainder of the BA staff based north of the Border – more than 100 cabin crew on its CityFlyer routes to London City airport – are not included, because they work for a subsidiary company.
Mr Walsh, who has already announced he will not draw his monthly salary in July of some £61,250, announced that staff will be able to opt for one-week blocks of unpaid leave or unpaid work, with salary deductions spread over three to six months.
The airline is also seeking more staff willing to move to temporary or part-time contracts, and consider unpaid leave of up to a year.
Keith Williams, BA's chief financial officer, is also working unpaid next month and the airline is also talking to its pilots about taking pay cuts.
Some 1,000 staff have already volunteered to take unpaid leave or switch to part-time work.
A spokesman for BA said: "This will help minimise the financial impact on individuals, while helping to immediately save cash for the business.
"The new unpaid work option means people can contribute to the cash-saving effort by coming to work while effectively volunteering for a small cut in pay."
The spokesman said it was a "personal choice" as to whether staff worked unpaid or took unpaid leave.
Mr Walsh said: "I am looking for every single part of the company to take part in some way in this cash-effective way of helping the company's survival plan. It really counts. Our survival depends on everyone contributing to changes that permanently remove costs from every part of the business."
However, unions said staff were far less able to forgo their pay than the chief executive.
A spokesman for Unite said: "Willie Walsh can afford to work a month for free. Our members can't."
The airline last month suffered a record annual loss in the face of the recession and high oil prices. It also recorded a 7.3 per cent drop in passenger numbers in May, compared to a year ago.
BA, Europe's third-biggest airline by revenue, announced annual operating losses of £220 million and forecast no immediate revival.
Mr Walsh has repeatedly warned that airlines were enduring the "worst trading environment the industry has ever faced".
Further redundancies have been signalled despite a cut in the workforce by 2,500 since March last year.
Last autumn, it closed its cabin crew base at Glasgow airport, with 135 jobs being transferred to London. One in ten Scotland-London flights has been axed because of reduced demand.
Cathay Pacific is among other airlines to have launched similar staff pay cut schemes.
A TOUCH DOWN
THE recession and high oil prices have come at a massive cost to BA.
The airline spent nearly £3 billion on fuel in the year to March, and £78 million on redundancies.
It said it will further reduce capacity by grounding up to 16 aircraft this winter and reducing total seats by 4 per cent.
However, BA claims to have put last year's chaotic opening of terminal five at Heathrow behind it. The carrier said the terminal's 24 million passengers to date loved its "improved punctuality, speedy baggage retrieval and lack of check-in queues".
The full article contains 616 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
