Is the Aer Lingus decision to outsource its frontline cabin crew the final nail in the coffin of the airline's national-carrier status, asks Kathy Sheridan
NO ONE CAN blank a customer quite like an airline employee. If maximising shareholder value means cutting staff numbers to the bone and paying a barely living wage, while demanding that Charysma buys her own uniform and doubles as a high-heeled, company billboard while peddling toasties, trinkets and raffle tickets to passengers, andrefrains from running up and down the plane screaming in the event of a sudden plunge, the shareholder can sleep easy.
However, once you combine the lethal cocktail of a delayed flight, screaming babies and no information, with a lone Charysma fronting up to flyers' impotent fury (if they're lucky), who can blame her for responding as if her customers are subhuman?
Airports and airlines are suffused with the snarling spirit of low-cost Charysma. Non-stop orders and warnings are barked from airport tannoys; basic services, such as human check-in staff and the natural expectation to sit beside your child, are now deemed to be "frills" and therefore ripe for another euro hustle.
The beauty of the scam is that no passenger dares to argue; he immediately exits the queue and scurries away to pay up. Too much time, planning, cash and hope are already invested in this trip; no one will risk being off-loaded. And so passengers shuffle through with the look of cowering dogs anticipating another slap around the chops.
But on occasion, the promise of a civilised flight lies ahead, perhaps with a more peremptory and less hospitable cabin crew than in days of yore, capable of identifying a passenger in trouble, swiftly producing a drink, an oxygen tank and two obviously caring staff to remain alongside all the way to the ground, and make efficient arrangements for his priority disembarkation.
Anyone who has ever been an emigrant, had an exhausting business trip or endured an isolating stay in an alien culture, will have experienced the warm glow of arriving at the gate and seeing the green bird on the runway that signified home.
Once, Aer Lingus was a national treasure, up there with Guinness, Waterford Crystal and Barry's Tea, an emotive plank in the complex structure of Irish identity, one of the few indigenous mega-brands. It liked to believe that it was holding on to that essential decency, even through the maulings of privatisation, redundancies, cost-cutting rampages and shameless aping of Ryanair's business model.
As former chief executive Willie Walsh told an Oireachtas transport committee a few years ago, no-frills airlines such as Ryanair were characterised as "cranky, basic, unapologetic and tolerable", while Aer Lingus - a "few-frills" airline - was "friendly, practical, fair and relevant". Overall, he said, it was "cheap and cheerful" as against the "cheap and nasty" proposition offered by the no-frills airlines.
While some would suggest that the "friendly" and "fair" elements have been somewhat diluted, the suspicion remains that if you become ill on board an Aer Lingus flight, you have a fighting chance of a sick bag and some TLC at least; or if you miss a flight, an Aer Lingus staffer will be more inclined to bail you out. Earned or not, the precious public goodwill is still there.
So if air travellers experienced a nervous lurch at Aer Lingus's announcement this week that its €74m-a-year cost-cutting plan includes the outsourcing of transatlantic routes to US cabin crews, it's probably because they anticipate more Charysmas representing maximum-shareholder-value. One of the few remaining USPs of the national carrier, its Irish frontline, is under threat.
Margaret, a senior cabin-crew member, reflects on 15 years of "virtually annual culling periods in Aer Lingus. But this is one of the worst. They've reached the bottom and there's very little fat to be shed. It's going to become more and more difficult. No matter what we do, they're back for more."
She has flown for nearly 30 years and she says what Aer Lingus now wants is the Ryanair model. "The average lifespan of a Ryanair cabin-crew member was 18 months; I'm told it's now down to nine." This matters, she insists, because experience matters.
"You have problem passengers on every airline and at one stage there were quite a few air-rage incidents. But I feel that we have a level of experience that enables us to deal with anything. As a senior member, I'm at the aircraft door for boarding and I can immediately spot the person who's going to be a problem. I've had tricky situations where people have had to be warned that the next person to deal with them would be the airport police. At this stage, there's nothing I can't handle. And there's an experienced person like me on every flight."
She also believes that the replacement of Irish cabin crew will "seriously affect the brand. It's not only the Irish but Americans in New York, Boston, Chicago who love to step on board and hear the Irish accents. That's when their holiday begins. We're very conscious of being ambassadors for Ireland when we're abroad, especially in the US. In the briefing to the cabin crew, you'd remind them that the most important part of the flight is the first 10 minutes. If you make passengers feel confident that we're friendly, professional, approachable and in control, that relaxes them and solves any problems."
But surely American cabin crews can be equally friendly and competent?
"I'm sure there are levels of American cabin crew who are equally friendly. But they have different standards to us. We have many years experience of crossing the Atlantic. That level of expertise has been passed on to each of us in the strictest form by our predecessors and it has been branded by the airline right down the years. Advertisements always showed cabin crew dealing with passengers in a discreet and caring manner."
The Irish crews are just different, she believes. This is manifest on short-haul, pay-bar flights, where that "relaxed, softer relationship" with passengers makes sound, commercial sense: Aer Lingus achieves higher pay-bar sales than any other airline on the back of it, she says.
The training, she claims, is as good as it always was. "Our own people - cabin crew - do the training. And every year we go back to do a two-day course with a written exam. We're also presented with different scenarios in a mock airport and our reactions are watched. If you don't pass, you can't fly."
She concedes that other standards might have dropped in the past 10 years, at a time when cabin-crew members were excluded from interviewing panels. "Certainly people were being recruited who were problematic. I believe that standards shot back up when our interviewers were reinstated."
FOR THE AIRLINE, the big question is whether brand or any of this stuff still matters in the dog-eat-dog aviation industry. In a company where brand is tied so closely to its front-line personnel, it must. Does the sight of the green bird on a foreign runway still create a glow?
John Fanning, author of The Importance of Being Branded: An Irish Perspective(Liffey Press), believes that the question was much more valid 10 years ago, when national airlines were still important. "But in today's world, you've got to re-frame the business model in which you operate. From my experience, the level of service in all the airlines, including Aer Lingus, has gone down. Yes, is a diminution in the quality of what the brand stands for but I suspect that's been slipping away anyway. People are being hassled in the same way as Ryanair; staff just get on with the job, trying to sell as much as possible; they don't want to get delayed by customers' queries or complaints - and that's a function of the competitive effect on national airlines by the low-fare airlines. What they have to do is offer extra value. They need to offer a better service than the non-service of Ryanair or Easyjet. They need greater punctuality and if not that, then have an Aer Lingus official there to answer questions if something goes wrong, such as whether there's a chance of a hotel or a meal voucher. If you could maintain a perceivable difference among customers in terms of realness and an element of civility, that's worth paying extra for . . . It comes down to what you stand for in these intangibles."
Then again, he says, these are factors that are comforting to the over-35s. "Kids don't care. They have more time."
And yet, national attachments to the old flag carriers die hard. When British Airways experimented with the removal of the Union Jack from its tail fins in 1997, Margaret Thatcher took one look at the scale model and deemed it ghastly. "We fly the British flag abroad, not these awful things," she snapped, pulling a handkerchief from her bag and draping it over the offending model before flouncing off. Here was one of the prime 20th-century champions of the free market chastising the executives of a company that she had privatised 10 years before, for diluting its British identity.
But perhaps in Ireland, Aer Lingus also stands for something more than nationalistic pride. Four years ago, when Aer Lingus was threatened with a takeover by Ryanair, UCD sociologist Kieran Allen argued that the groundswell of opposition to the sale of the airline was driven by "the deep sense of unease in Ireland about privatisation and its consequences", rather than mere residual affection for Aer Lingus.
Far from living off its past status as an icon of modernity, "Aer Lingus is seen as a symbol that transporting people is not just about profit". It was a prescient remark, coming two years before the wholesale outsourcing of 500 Irish Ferries jobs in 2006.
Last January, as 400 guests assembled at Dublin port for the naming ceremony of Irish Ferries' latest vessel, Ken Fleming of the Irish Transport Workers' Federation noted that the mainly eastern European workers on the company's route to France would be paid around €4 an hour, less than half the Irish minimum wage.
The consequences of a relentless pursuit of profit, bonuses and shareholder value have been on global show in recent weeks. Margaret, for one, hopes that Aer Lingus management are taking notes.