Word: free
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Tempted to ask for that extra in-flight pillow? Or rant about a flight delay? Tread carefully: your airline's staff may just be working for free. British Airways recently asked its 40,000 employees to consider laboring for nothing for up to one month. "Colleagues are being urged to help the airline's cash-saving drive by signing up for unpaid leave or unpaid work," read an article in BA News, the carrier's in-house newspaper. Chief executive Willie Walsh, who has pledged to forgo his $100,000 monthly salary in July, said the airline was caught...
...going further. Volunteers can sacrifice between a week and one month's worth of salary, or else spread the pain by taking a reduced salary for three to six months. Union officials have scoffed at the proposal. "Willie Walsh can afford to work a month for free," says a spokesman for Unite, BA's biggest union. "Our members can't." (See pictures of London's Heathrow Airport...
...Coaxing staff to work for free is only the airline's latest effort to pare costs. BA has said it will idle 16 more planes this winter, adding to the 3% cut in capacity instigated in late 2008. Management bonuses have been shelved. Unpaid leave and temporary or permanent part-time work, meanwhile, have been on the table since last month. And talks with unions are continuing over how to squeeze staff costs still further - BA's head count has already fallen by 2,500 since last summer. (Read "British Airways: Cabin Pressure...
...first Gulf War, BA gave away some $10 million worth of seats in what it dubbed the "world's greatest offer." That move "had a party atmosphere and a confidence and scale that actually built the BA brand despite the fact that it was giving stuff away for free," recalls Rita Clifton, chairman of global brand consultancy Interbrand...
...what exactly makes Twitter the medium of the moment? It's free, highly mobile, very personal and very quick. It's also built to spread, and fast. Twitterers like to append notes called hashtags - #theylooklikethis - to their tweets, so that they can be grouped and searched for by topic; especially interesting or urgent tweets tend to get picked up and retransmitted by other Twitterers, a practice known as retweeting, or just RT. And Twitter is promiscuous by nature: tweets go out over two networks, the Internet and SMS, the network that cell phones use for text messages, and they...