Aer Lingus hit by ‘Memogate’

The 40-page report suggested initiatives that could push the airline’s employees to seek “voluntary” redundancy. The moves included assigning staff inconvenient shifts, requiring pilots to take training courses that were said to be tedious and over-long, and giving some middle managers “a tap on the shoulder” to tell them they had no prospect of further advancement with the company.
Some sources also said there had been a suggestion that the cabin crew uniform would be changed from its current traditional look to an outfit comprising jumpsuits and t-shirts.
The memo was greeted with consternation and outrage in many quarters. It immediately became the subject of three investigations. On Tuesday, the Oireachtas Transport Committee convened a special session to talk about the document. Two government ministries, Transport and Enterprise, are also examining how the memo came to be drawn up and whether it breaches employment regulations.
“Workers should not be treated this way,” Enterprise Minister Micheal Martin said. “I will ask our people to examine it in the context of existing labor laws. There is legislation under our department . . .to deal with workplace bullying and so on.”
Labor unions, meanwhile, reacted with fury to the plan.
“We have been asked if we want an apology,” Aer Lingus branch secretary Christy McQuillan told the Irish Independent, the newspaper that broke the story. “It is not just about an apology. The [Oireachtas] committee should make the Aer Lingus management accountable in public for this document.”
There are still some questions about the exact provenance of the document, but there is no doubt that it came from within the upper reaches of Aer Lingus. It is titled “Business Plan — HR Strategy 2004”. HR stands for Human Resources. According to current Aer Lingus chairman John Sharman, the memo was prepared by the senior human resources team at the request of senior executives. The SIPTU labor union has said it intends to ‘name and shame’ the eight bosses it believes had input into the document.
The document outlined twelve moves that could pressurize staff to leave. These measures were described as “environmental push factors”.
The first item on the list is ” ‘tap on the shoulder’ for all relevant superintendents’.” Other ideas include “adverse changes in work/shift patterns”, “significantly reduced overtime”, “no transport” (a reference to special staff buses laid on at Dublin Airport for cabin crew working unsociable hours), and “lack of availability” of a specific kind of leave.
The ninth of the twelve factors is “assignment to resource centre”, which, according to the Irish Independent, referred to requiring pilots to attend a training center some staff referred to as “Guantanamo Bay”.
John Sharman has insisted that he has nothing to apologize for, and that the document never came close to being implemented. In a statement to staff, Sharman said that the memo was “never and is not now a statement of management policy.” He also said “the document had no function since that discussion [over a severance package for Aer Lingus workers] concluded.”
However, while strongly pushing the idea that the document was purely theoretical, Sharman conceded that the way it was written was likely to cause disquiet amongst staff:
“We appreciate that the language used in the document is being seen as impersonal and clinical and therefore, can I express our regret for any offence taken or implied,” his statement noted.
Many Aer Lingus staff are not mollified by such sentiments.
“Things like this are always subtle,” Jean Cashman, a member of Aer Lingus cabin crew with 31 years’ experience, told the Echo. “People say, ‘we never implemented it’. But the point is that this was the ethos coming down from the top.”
Cashman argued that issues like changing the cabin crew uniform, which are sometimes seen as superficial and therefore relatively insignificant, are in fact of major importance.
“The uniform I wear is supposed to send out a professional message. It is supposed to say to passengers that if something goes wrong, they should follow me and follow the directions I give them. To change that is like stripping away our professionalism. It’s part of the whole issue of a lack of respect.”
Cashman also noted, however, that most Aer Lingus workers were not especially surprised about the contents of the memo. Asked if she believed its emergence had affected morale in a negative way, she contended that, if anything, the opposite was the case:
“We are surprised that all of you in the media are surprised,” she said. “But we’ve seen it all happen in practice over a period of years. Really, the document coming out has confirmed that we were right in what we thought about a lot of things.
“One colleague of mine told me she was relieved when it all came out, because she thought her friends and family had started to think she was mad because she kept talking about how difficult it was to get leave.”
Despite all this, Cashman contends that she does not want to see the airline damaged and that she has great confidence in Sharman’s ability as chairman.
“I’m very concerned about who leaked the document and why,” she said. “Did they do it to be mischievous to Aer Lingus? Because I do see signs that things are being done in a more professional way at the moment. I don’t want anything I say to disrupt the fragile way that things are moving in the right direction.”
Aer Lingus bosses, under severe pressure from every quarter, must be hoping that all the airline’s employees will extend the same degree of understanding.
That seems unlikely.