'Slasher Walsh' Touches down at British Airways

TAKEN FROM THE DAILY MAIL FINANCIAL SECTION

Just a stone’s throw from British Aiways glass covered headquarters near Heathrow Airport, six men and a woman huddle together on a roadside verge under a makeshift canvas shelter.

The seven are just a handful of the 670 workers sacked by Gate Gourmet, the airlines heathrow caterer.

For BA boss Willie Walsh – driving past them on his first morning in charge after a five month handover period with Sir Rod Eddington – they personify the changes ahead.
He got off to a good start with a 7.8% increase in passenger revenues for september despite the GG fiasco.
But Walsh will have to deal with more union torment, dissafected workers and problems with suppliers- and that is just for starters.
The diminutive Walsh is a dublin born pilot who has been thrust into the limelight as the airlines new chief Executive.
In Ireland he has a reputation as a scourge of the unions after slashing 40% of the 6100 strong workforce at Aer Lingus in just 3 years. But mention the former GG employees and he simply shrugs his shoulders. It seems he is not willing to show his tough, not yet, anyway!.
In fact it is hard to understand wheather he plans to get tough, because his conversation is riddled with business jargon. ‘critical areas of change have been communicated,’ he says mysteriously.
Of the these critical areas is preparing for Heathrows Terminal 5 which will open for business in 2008.

If he gets the T5 move right, he will free the airline from the shackles of outdated industry practices that have threatened to strangle it since privatised 20 years ago.
T5 is the key, because of the way the airlines Heathrow staff operate. Bizzare as it seems, a bag from a plane arriving at terminal1 is unloaded and put on a converyour belt in a different way to the one that arrives in Terminal 4.
The merger of BA’s Heathrow operations into one terminal in March 2008 with wipe out such inefficiences. Has Walsh made any progress with the all powerful Transport and General workers union? This line of questioning makes him revert instantly into management gibberish.
He says: ‘The approach so far has been on what processes are relevant. But everyone we’ve spoken to acknowledges that we’ll do different things in a different way’.
Who knows what that means, But Walsh refuses to spell it out, Perhaps he hides behind jargon, because he doesnt know the answer – or more likely he does not want to say.
He rufuses to comment on suggestions that up to 6000 of BA’s 46000 staff could go in a shakeup, calling such stories ‘speculation’
But Walsh is committed to sticking to Eddingtons plan to strip out another £300million a year from staff costs by March 2007, Souces within BA have said that up 15% of the airlines 2200 ground staff will have to go, Walsh adds: ‘i look at T5 as if its a blank sheet of paper, I want to make sure we operate in the most efficient way’ He constantly refers to what the customer wants, suggesting that online check-in and baggage drops will advance since they have proved popular in polls.
Such changes will take months of talks, but atleast Walsh has plenty of experiance with the stroppy unions at Aer Lingus.
Until January when he walked out in a row over privatisation plans, he had spent his entire career at the Irish flag carrier, joined at 17 as a cadet pilot.
He was a strident trade unionist himself until he joined the management, earning himself the nicknames Boxcar willie and Slasher Walsh for his roles on opposite sides of the fence. During a 1980’s pilots strike he fought hard against plans to cut jobs, But his activist tendencies went by the wayside as he rose through ranks – picking up an MSc in management and business administration at Dublins Trinity College along the way – before being promoted to captain in 1990.
It was the start of his ascent through the management tiers. He moved through various desk jobs before becoming boss of Aer Lingus’s Spanish charter operation Futura in 1998. That led to the top job at the end of 2001.