At the time of the Gate Gourmet strike British Airways lost the input Essay

At the time of the Gate Gourmet strike British Airways lost the input of an essential key supplier with huge consequences for the firm - Essay Example On the other hand, British Airways outsourced its in-flight catering to Gate Gourmet as a way of minimising operational costs through the provision of minimal wages and offering working contracts without pensions, holiday or sick leave pay. The result of this was that British Airways was able to register more profits for itself at the expense of the immigrant workers that worked for Gate Gourmet. The strike action began one morning after the Gate Gourmet women of Indian origin came from their tea break and found other workers that had replaced them because the new employees were willing to work for even lesser pay as compared to the former workers (Hickey 2005). As a result of this, the baggage handlers stormed out of their workstations in protest over the sacking of these women and the ill treatment that they had received from their employer. This led to the closure of the Heathrow Airport for at least forty eight hours in which the media took the opportunity to highlight the disgru ntlement that customers had experienced during the time of the strike. Ideally, the job of a continuity manager is to ensure that an organisation returns to efficient capacity in service delivery as soon as possible while also making sure that a company’s customers are not affected much by the discontinuity. Essentially, strike action tends to be a confrontational crisis in which workers that have no job satisfaction use this as a venue for expressing themselves as provided for in the labour laws (Laws 2013, p. 93). The fist step is to ensure that passengers scheduled for short overhaul flights access food through their food vouchers, meaning that the strike should not ground them. The handling of this should be with a standby team that a continuity manager should ensure that an airline has in place in the vent that such a situation occurs in