....The Union.
In a few hours British Airways (BA) cabin crew and check in staff will complete their first strike in a dispute over the future of the airline. As with all trade union disputes both sides have been less then truthful about the impact of the strike with BA especially mounting a huge disinformation campaign. It does though appear that this strike action has gone the way of Unite the Union.
Of a total of around 12,000 available staff only around 1000 have been turning up to work on strike days. This figure includes staff who were overseas when the strike began and were therefore not allowed to go on strike until they had worked a flight back to the UK. As around 3000 of those 12,000 staff are not members of the striking union there is no evidence that any union member has broken the strike and crossed the picket line. This deep level of support for the strike meant that BA was forced to ground 125 of its 205 available aircraft. The majority of the flights that were able to take off were cargo planes that do not require cabin crew and "ghost flights" of passenger aircraft that were flown without passengers either to ship freight or to move the aircraft to the correct airport for when the strike ends. In total only around a dozen BA passenger flights were able to fly during the strike.
Although the strike has clearly had the unions desired effect on BA's operations this does not mean that BA's chief executive, Willie Walsh, is necessarily lying when he says that the companies contingency plan is working. This is because the main thrust of that plan was to transfer as many BA passengers as possible to flights on rival airlines. As a result 26,000 of the 77,000 passengers who were expected to fly over the weekend have taken their custom to BA's rivals and BA have paid those competitors to take on the extra business. Of the remaining 49,000 passengers around 47,500 reached their destinations flying on so called "Vanilla Aircraft." These are passenger aircraft that are operated by specialist companies who rent the planes out a flight at a time to tour operators and large airlines who need extra capacity in the short term. Although the quality of these aircraft vary from operator to operator they tend to only have economy class cabins and fly with the minimum safety number of cabin crew who are provided along with the aircraft. Therefore if you've paid for a Executive Club ticket you will find yourself very disappointed to be flying on a vanilla plane. Plus it costs BA money to charter these aircraft and crew meaning they're having to pay to maintain two fleets of aircraft in order to do half the amount of business. According them BA this costing the £7million per day plus the lost revenue. Clearly this is not sustainable in the long term especially if BA are also going to continue to rent big coaches with blacked out windows to drive empty across picket lines to try and falsely convince the strikers that people are scabbing.
This strong showing by the union should be enough to encourage a rational chief executive back to the negotiating table. Unfortunately Willie Walsh is the sort of short and angry man who will ignore the cost and use the number of staff who did work and the number of passengers who were moved to refine his contingency plan in the hope of besting the union in the next round of strikes. That means that this dispute will have to go to a third strike before both sides are finished with the foreplay.
On a personal note last Friday my mother and siblings celebrated my sisters birthday. We went to an Italian restaurant where the manager had watched the Go Compare TV advert one too many times. They'd invited an actually rather good opera singer to preform live in the very small restaurant. As a result I got the theme from the BA adverts sung to me very loudly about 12 inches from my left ear. On reflection it was a very good idea of my sister not to turn up to her own birthday celebration.
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