British Airways is asking thousands of its staff to work for free for up to four weeks, spokeswoman Kirsten Millard said Tuesday.

In an e-mail to all its staff, the airline offered workers between one and four weeks of unpaid leave — but with the option to work during this period. British Airways employs just more than 40,000 people in the United Kingdom.

Last month, the company posted a record annual loss of £400 million ($656 million).

Its chief executive declared at the time there were “absolutely no signs of recovery” in the industry.

“I’m 30 years in this business and I’ve never seen anything like this. This is by far the biggest crisis the industry has ever faced,” said Willie Walsh, British Airways’ chief executive.

A spokesman for one of Britain’s biggest unions said its workers could not afford to work for free for a month.

“It’s all well and good for Willie Walsh to say he’s prepared to work for free when he earns four times in a month what they do in a year,” said Ciaran Naidoo, a spokesman for Unite.

He pointed out that the airline was not ordering staff to work without pay.

“It’s a request — you can take unpaid leave or you can work for free, and the chances of people working for free are very unlikely, but there might be some people who want to take unpaid leave.”

Demand for the airline’s passenger seats and cargo holds fell during the last financial year, while its fuel bill rocketed to almost £3 billion ($4.7 billion).

Walsh said British Airways’ woes were inextricably linked to the downturn in the global economy and that there had been no sign of any “green shoots” of recovery.

Like its premium-class competitors, British Airways is losing customers to cheaper rivals.

The airline’s premium passenger numbers fell 13% in the second half of last year, in line with the industry average.

Total traffic fell 3.4% and while the airline carried 33.1 million passengers last year, it was a drop of 4.3% on the previous year.

The dip in demand for British Airways’ flights has forced a switch in strategy at the airline.

From the end of last year, it has been trying to tempt passengers with lower fares, sacrificing profit per seat for “bums on seats.”

It plans to reduce capacity by 4% next winter by parking up to 16 aircraft.

In an article I read, Soros called credit default swaps as instruments of destruction. Below is part of the article:Soros said the asymmetry of risk and reward embedded in CDS exerted so much downward pressure on the bonds underlying the contracts that companies and financial institutions could be brought to their knees.

“Some derivatives ought not to be allowed to be traded at all. I have in mind credit default swaps. The more I’ve heard about them, the more I’ve realized they’re truly toxic,” he told a banking conference.

“CDS are instruments of destruction which ought to be outlawed,” Soros told a meeting of the Institute of International Finance, many of whose member banks and financial institutions are active participants in the huge CDS market.

Going short on bonds by purchasing a CDS contract carried limited risk but almost unlimited profit potential. By contrast, selling CDSs offered limited profit and practically unlimited risk, Soros said.

He said one financial institution that discovered to its cost the risk/reward distortions of CDS was insurer American International Group, which was a big seller of CDS, offering banks protection against a deterioration in their bond portfolios, especially mortgage-linked securities.

“AIG thought it was selling insurance on bonds and as such CDS were outrageously overpriced. In fact AIG was selling bear market warrants and it severely underestimated their value,” Soros said.

But the potential damage that CDS could do was not limited to financial firms, Soros added. He pointed to the bankruptcy of North America’s largest newsprint maker, AbitibiBowater Inc, and the pending bankruptcy of General Motors”In both cases, some bondholders owned CDS and they stood to gain more by bankruptcy than by reorganization.

“It’s like buying life insurance on someone else’s life and owning a license to kill,” he concluded.

Soros’ criticism echoes fellow investor Warren Buffet’s description of derivatives in 2003 as “financial weapons of mass destruction.”

On derivatives in general, Soros said they should be as strictly regulated as stocks.

He said derivatives should be standardized and saw no case for custom-made derivatives, which he said only increased the profit margins of the financiers who tailored them.

Oil prices broke through the $70 per-barrel barrier Friday and more forecasters are broadening expectations for an upward swing in crude.

Benchmark crude for July delivery lost 37 cents to settle at $68.44 on the New York Mercantile Exchange, finishing the week with a gain of nearly $2 a barrel.

Earlier in the day oil jumped as high as $70.32 per barrel, the highest since October.

Oil prices have been soaring for months despite a massive surplus of petroleum and natural gas. A large amount of speculative money has flowed into the markets, according to government reports, potentially taking advantage of a weak U.S. currency.

Surging energy prices appear to be outpacing an economic recovery for now, and there are concerns that consumers may pull back spending further, especially with retail gasoline nearing the $3 mark.

“That everyday, in-your-face experience of seeing higher gas prices at the pump; that has quite an impact on people’s psyche,” said Tom Kloza, publisher and chief oil analyst at Oil Price Information Service.

“There’s this feeling of ‘here we go again’ with what happened last year,” Kloza said.

“It hurts discretional spending.

“It leaves people to think about not taking those summer vacations.”

This week, Goldman Sachs revised its forecast and predicted that oil would rally to $85 a barrel by the end of the year as the economy stabilizes and OPEC production cuts take hold.

The forecast assumes, however, that the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries will stick to its cuts – and that has never been a sure bet.

Yet even news that could be perceived as negative on the surface has brought more money into oil markets.