The British Air Line Pilots Association (BALPA) has published a review of Up in the Air: How Airlines Can Improve Performance by Engaging their Employees, the book authored by several members of the Airline Industry Council.

 Below is an extract from The Log, British Air Line Pilot’s Association, April/May, 2009

“Our pick of the best aviation-inspired books this month

Up in the Air: How Airlines can Improve Performance by Engaging their Employees.

By Greg J Bamber, Thomas A Kochan, Jody Hoffer Gittell, Andrew von Nordenflycht, Cornell University Press, New York, ISBN 987-0-8014-4747-1

This refreshingly readable and persuasive book challenges the emerging orthodoxy that low-cost must mean low staff morale and low customer satisfaction. Drawing on examples from across the world, including ‘legacy’ airlines such as British Airways and new entrants such as Ryanair and easyJet, the authors analyse the competitive and employment-relations strategies that airlines have adopted. Outcomes for customers, employees, and other stakeholders are analysed. The authors categorise employment-relations strategies as either controlling employee behaviour, or aiming to foster commitment.  

In terms of relationships with Unions, airlines can seek to avoid or oppose Unions, accommodate them by accepting their legitimacy or partner with Unions seeking to establish a deeper relationship than contractually required. The authors suggest that Ryanair’s employment strategy is to focus on low costs via anti-unionism and employee control. British Airways appears to accommodate Unions and practises more of a control approach. By contrast, Southwest adopts much more of a partnership and commitment approach. One paradox is that the rhetoric of some airlines has emphasised the importance of fostering employee commitment and offering good customer service, while simultaneously seeking to reduce employees’ economic rewards or other benefits. Such airlines are not reaping the potential advantages of developing partner relationships with their workforce and Unions. This highlights, according to the book, that the trinity of sustained profitability for investors, good customer service and positive relations with employees can be achieved with positive industrial-relations strategies. The authors suggest that the genuine partnerships should feature: joint commitment to the success of the enterprise; efforts to build trust; employment security in exchange for flexibility; quality training programmes; information sharing and joint problem solving with managers and employees.

To maintain a more sustainable airline industry, with more economic security, there is a need for bold and open-minded leadership. Regrettably the book could easily be overlooked in the face of gathering economic clouds. But, as Southwest founder Herb Kelleher observed, ‘nothing kills your culture like layoffs’, so how the economic downturn is navigated will be crucial to how companies emerge from the downturn. “

– Jim McAuslan General Secretary of the British Airline Pilots’ Association (BALPA), London