British Airways Strikes

On Tuesday March 30th British Airways (BA) cabin crew and check in staff completed their second round of strikes. This round went to the BA management and played out pretty much how I predicted it would after the first round of strikes.

Having gathered a clearer intelligence picture of which staff would strike and which staff would work BA used this information to refine their contingency plan. This mainly involved rostering non-striking staff onto short haul flights and potential strikers onto long haul flights where the up to twelve day tours of duty prevented them from taking part in the four day strike. BA also followed through on their threat to remove discounted travel perks from staff who participated in the strike which encouraged some strike breaking but is now obviously a spent threat. The result of the refined contingency plan was that BA was able to move around 10% more BA passengers on BA aircraft reducing their reliance on chartered vanilla aircraft. This reduced BA daily losses on strike days from around £7million to around £5.5million. BA was also able to clear its backlog quicker then I was able to clear mine.

Away from the actual strikes BA have been going to great lengths to convince the stock market that it is coping just fine with the strikes. This mainly involved widely spreading the rumour that the full seven days of strike action would cost BA a frankly ridiculous £70million. That meant that when they announced yesterday (7/4) that the strikes had only cost £47million it sounded as if BA had won even though that figure is still slightly above the realistic estimate. Today BA have also announced that they expect to complete a merger with the Spanish airline, Iberia by the end of 2010. This sort of business expansion is not what you would expect from a company that is in the serious financial troubles that BA is telling Unite the Union that it is in.

Since Friday, April 2nd there have been very hush hush talks between BA management and the Unite leadership. This is the moment where BA had planned to be accepting Unite's unconditional surrender. Provided that Unite's leadership remember which side they're meant to be on I don't think that will happen now because the union still have plenty of scope to broaden the length, frequency and therefore impact of any future strike action.