Tony Woodley Needs To Go.

Tony Woodley is the joint general secretary of the British Trade Union Unite. He represents the Transport & General Workers side of the union that is behind the strikes by British Airways (BA) cabin crew that have been called today. The timing of these strikes is somewhere between foolish and state sponsored. The airline British Airways gets its business from two core groups of customers;

1. Business travellers. These customers make dozens of long haul flights a year that are usually paid for by large multi-national banks through multi-million pound contracts that provide BA with most of their income. These passengers normally travel on Monday's to Fridays and without their repeat business BA would very quickly find itself in serious financial trouble.

2. Leisure travellers. More commonly know as tourists these passengers make two sometimes three flights a year for the annual summer holiday and the occasional short-weekend break. These passengers who tend to be hardworking couples and families normally fly Friday through Monday and BA normally makes a loss on these flights having been priced out of the market by so called no-frills airlines like Easyjet.

In order to settle their industrial dispute with British Airways Unite have decided to call two strikes. The first of these will take place on Friday March 2oth and run until Monday March 23rd. The second will take place on Saturday March 27th and run until Tuesday March 31st. That means that these strikes have been timed not only to attack the most sympathetic group of BA passengers but also cause the minimum amount of disruption to BA's business.

Therefore it's kind of obvious that Tony Woodley and his self-appointed heir apparent, Len McClusky have done a deal with BA management. The idea being that the ineffectiveness of these strikes and inevitable infighting that will result from the ineffectiveness of these strikes will undermine the support for the strike and force the cabin crew to accept the lowest offer that BA will put on the table which does rather defeat the purpose of going on strike in the first place.

That is not how you do effective negotiation so BA management must literally be wetting themselves with laughter at these strikes. Or at least they will be until they realise that all it means is that they've got to endure 7 days of strikes before they put their first offer on the table.