What happens to Ita? Not just for hat boxes …
Not only the case of hat boxes: Ita's poor experience in personnel management had already emerged with the methods of recruitment adopted and even more so with the employment contract that recalls a manufacturing Italy from the 1950s. The article by Paolo Rubino, former top manager of Alitalia
365 at dawn . This is the title of a good 1987 film directed by Marco Risi. It tells the story of corporal Claudio Scanna, a recruit assigned to the 47th “Fortapàsc” battalion stationed in Friuli, at the time still a borderland with the twilight world of Yugoslavia. And his lieutenant, Armando Fili, a man frustrated in his career, insecure, obsessed with an obsolete concept of discipline, a pathological jealousy and devoid of any charisma.
The film reflects the crisis which, in the mid-1980s, had irremediably compromised the value of military service, a national institution in place since the nation's unity in 1860.
The absence of investments, innovations and congruous purposes in the military field had in fact reduced the Italian military organization to a mere bureaucratic, habitual and hateful fact for the conscripts. In short, a place of temporary grazing lasting one year for every young male citizen and neurotic grazing for life for officers and non-commissioned officers condemned to a grim existence without ambitions and moral as well as material recognition.
Lieutenant Fili targets the recruit Scanna, pursues her annihilation in an obtuse and unfair way. The degeneration of the military draft, outlined in the film, would have led to the inevitable outcome of its legal abolition in Italy in 2004.
The episode that sees the entrepreneur and communicator Costanza Esclapon de Villeneuve as protagonist aboard the Ita flight between Palermo and Linate on 29 October last and the reaction of the top management of the Company towards the staff on board that flight causes the newborn Ita to fall in the gloomy climate of Risi's film.
The fact that has happened, for those who are a little familiar with the daily routine of air flights, is in itself really trivial: the passenger, who boarded one of the last, has difficulty in arranging the baggage which, for haste and personal convenience, did not sit in the hold upon check in.
Aircraft overhead bins are not known to be infinite space. Furthermore, the safety regulations, made even more restrictive by the covid emergency, impose categorical limits on the loading of baggage in the cabin.
Experienced flyers understand this situation clearly and, of course, resort to every expedient to get around it.
Flight attendants have always been trained to handle this typical situation. The training method is based on learning the so-called assertiveness behavioral techniques. The greater the familiarity of the flight attendants with these techniques, the more rapid and fluid the management of the eternal, unavoidable, dialectic between the self-referential requests of the passengers and the professional obligation of the cabin crew which consists in facilitating an orderly boarding of the flight. , respectful of all regulations, courteous and primarily functional to the punctuality of take-off.
Expecting passengers to renounce self-referencing is naive, unless Ryanair's colony procedures are adopted. Imagining that the cabin crew manage exceptions by bowing to the self-referentiality of each passenger is incompetent. Relying on the professionalism of the contact staff is the only fruitful way for those who work in the services and cultivating that professionalism with adequate investments in training is the task of the management.
Obviously, if the staff is a “newbie”, temporary problems may arise which experience will correct. Could it be that the staff of the newborn Ita is made up of new hires with no experience? If indeed so, the episode involving Esclapon de Villeneuve must be reduced to a normal growth accident of a company of newbies.
But the fear that assails is, instead, that the leaders of Ita, humiliated, by their own admission, by heads of foreign companies who have demanded the segregation of the old name Alitalia judged a ballast in the alliance negotiations, such as Lieutenant Fili of 365 days at dawn they seek redemption with dull hierarchical fury towards employees.
Such are the sanctioning measures to the crew of the Palermo-Linate flight for the "disrespect" towards the passenger and it does not matter that such measures are mere threat or translate into concrete actions. On the other hand, the poor experience in the management of Ita personnel had already vigorously emerged with the methods of recruitment adopted and even more with the employment contract that recalls a manufacturing Italy from the 1950s rather than a contemporary service company in a ' highly competitive industry.
For these leaders, the words pronounced by President Mattarella in an event at the Quirinale on 10 November last are worth a warning: "Flexibility – in employment contracts – increases inequalities, often translates into insufficient salaries and an expansion of the audience of the poor. from work 'with low wages, intermittent and involuntary part-time jobs ”.
The inadequacy of a top management is never an “uncaused root cause”. As for Lieutenant Fili in Risi's film, it is the consequence of approximation, of the scarcity of ideas, of the a priori renunciation of undertaking enterprises, of the loss of ideal motivations of the organization as a whole. How many days remain at the dawn of the end for Alitalia reincarnated in Ita?
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/smartcity/che-cosa-succede-a-ita/ on Wed, 17 Nov 2021 06:32:45 +0000.