Coffee, tea or job. For one former flight attendant at national airline BWIA, this is what it had come down to. A career at the 64-year-old carrier was not working out, especially when there was a young son involved.
It was shaping up to be an uncertain future for other airline workers.
In a critical area of operations that continues, to this day, to be stretched to its human resource limits, BWIA staffers joked that a more apt title for the BWIA Reservations department would be the "BWIA Resignations" department.
Another example: Listen to travellers and you might be left with the impression that the travel industry has forgotten the basics of customer service.
But for two former BWIA employees who were on the airline's front lines at Piarco International Airport until recently, champagne tastes from travellers on beer budgets, was just too much to take.
Particularly, when they haven't had a salary increase in years, a monthly paycheck did not compensate for daily insults from irate passengers, one of the former service reps told Express Business last week.
Even though they would only speak on condition of anonymity, they believed the airline could still fly out of its problems.
At a time when the travel industry generally agrees that travelers who pay more deserve more, BWIA has found itself in a place where its staff members are taking flight. Literally.
Over the past few months, BWIA staff members have been tendering their resignations, many of them with immediate effect.
A rift between executive management, employees and the union representing workers continues to exist over wages even as planes continue to fly full.
To be certain, BWIA has probably endured more than its fair share of financial woes and the money simply may not exist to increase salaries at a time when most international airlines are struggling just to stay in the air.
But frustrated by what they describe as uncertainty in BWIA's business, staffers have moved on to where the grass is greener.
Hundreds have left the cash-strapped airline, some of them senior airline employees, others who will list BWIA as their first job.
"There has been a movement of BWIA staff in all areas," says Christopher Abraham, president of the Aviation, Communications and Allied Workers Union, the body that represents the majority of the airline's 1,600 workers.
Poor terms and conditions of employment and insecurity about current positions seem to be the complaint heard most often, he told Express Business in an interview last week.
Reservations, in-flight and customer service departments are the operations areas most affected, he explains, adding that these departments have been stretched thin for years.
What makes it worse is that as quickly as staff members leave the airline, others are trained to replace them but not as many are hired to fill the gaps completely.
His figures indicate that between 2001 and September, 2004, about 1,000 staff have exited BWIA.
Of course, the majority of these departures can be attributed to the fact that the airline staff went through two sets of layoffs, bringing its head count down from 2,800 to just over 2,000.
But employees also have left on their own and it has caused the airline some hiccups.
It also comes at a time when the airline's fleet has been troubled by mechanical problems which temporarily took two planes out of service for a while.
It caused a series of delays on the company's flight schedule.
Many have cited the fact that BWIA staff members are working on a pay scale that goes back to 1997.
Both employees and the union say they are frustrated with the slow pace of negotiations for better wages, Abraham explains.
BWIA also has lost staff, ironically because it boasts one of the best in-house training programmes in the country.
What happens is that staff members are trained at BWIA and then snapped up by other companies who need customer service reps and who can pay them sometimes twice what they take home from the airline.
Ultimately, "there isn't sufficient manpower at the airline", Abraham suggests.
But corporate communications manager Dionne Ligoure counters that people leaving the company and changing jobs are all parts of progress and natural progression.
"What BWIA is doing for the people that leave is that the airline has re-hired," she told Express Business last week. "We are going through the process for the people that leave," she explains, noting that new staff have been hired for the Reservations department and for Customer Service and In-flight as well.
"We will continue to replenish the human resource element which we consider one of the most significant assets of the airline," she added.
