Gobonastick - as someone who always goes out of my way to help passengers and never looks at the union limits for working - only the legal limits - I take an exception to what you say. I don't even know what my union limits are, the passenger - my wage payer - always comes first. Until that is, the company do something which you really need to stand up to. None of us want to strike, none of us want the disruption, however as you can see without any problem, BA is screwing things up and you need a force to point them in the other direction. All those forces have been used up except the threat of strike - so what do we do? Disrupt a relatively small number of holidays so that literally millions are not disrupted in the future, or say that the passenger is king, lose the fight and create many times more misery in the future?
You have to realise that those who post on here are a minority and a voiceiforous one at that. Some of them know very little about what they are talking about. May I suggest that you have a good look at teh BALPA campaign website and understand the details of what is actually going on. This is about our livelihoods for the next 50 years or so, its important. Customers deserve better from BA, but the problem is not with the pilots, its with the managers at the top of the company.