Who's to blame?
Who is really to blame?
There is simply no excuse for illegal action. The law is the glue that holds a society together; it also protects the weak from the strong and the abused from the abuser. At the moment I’m absolutely furious that a few union hotheads have completely ignored the law and, as a consequence, cost my company £80 million and in the process probably driven the final nail into our FSS pension scheme. I’d like to string the bastards up by their hairy ball bags and leave them to rot at gallows constructed somewhere around the hold 27L.
However on reflection I’m not sure my anger is being directed at those truly responsible. The actions of the Gate Gourmet management are becoming more widely known and frankly are so reprehensible and illegal that BA surely has a moral duty to change supplier with immediate effect.
Many of the GG staff were originally employed by BA. Just like you and me. They were then sold off and TUPE came into effect. However, in a tough market, GG management made promises they simply couldn’t deliver. But these promises came with huge bonuses for their management. The people that had to pay for their greed were the low paid whose already very low pay came under immediately under attack. The quality of food became so poor that Virgin stopped dealing with GG a few months ago. Even BA SH pilots who will eat anything if it’s put in front of them noticed that the food on offer was reaching levels that made it almost inedible. A series of illegal, despicable and utterly immoral programs were initiated by the GG management. All aimed at undermining those who should have been protected under law by TUPE. But nobody really cares about the low paid do they? Somehow our society only seems to really care about the rights of the middle classes and above. Everybody else is just lucky to be employed.
On Thursday GG were handing out redundancy notices (that’s the sack) to employees who had worked in some cases for over 30 years in the same job. At the same time they brought in 130 “part time” seasonal workers to cover the operation. This is illegal and immoral. It was also designed to intimidate a workforce into taking the only action the poor and low paid can ultimately take. They simply stopped working. There can be doubt that this was pre-planned as the police and ready made termination notices were already in position. (Some interesting questions need to be asked about the police involvement. Somebody in GG must be able to call in some pretty big favours with Mr Plod to get this type of response BEFORE any action had taken place……London needs all the police it can get at the moment). The GG staff were all herded into their canteen and held against their wishes. Yep the staff were locked in and not able to leave the building. That is again so against the law that it beggars belief. Then they were sacked by loud hailer and 600 termination notices handed out. But it wasn’t just those who were held captive that were sacked it also applied to those who had the day off or even those who were on holiday. Again the law was completely ignored by those who stood to receive huge bonuses by getting round the TUPE agreements. Yet our police force were assisting in this action.
To whom do these people turn? The police who had assisted in their dismissal? The law is certainly out of reach for these people and also takes years to address any situation. They have families and mortgages just like you and me. They have bills to pay and food to buy today. Not sometime in the future. So they turned to the only people who really care, their families. It just so happened that many of these worked for BA. And they did the only thing that the low paid can do………they stopped working. The militant seized the initiative and BA end up losing £80 million.
There are union hotheads who play politics with peoples lives. BA must get rid of these people. There are many work practises that simply have to change if BA wants to survive: mostly on the ground, some in the air and, god forbid, one or two on our side of the flightdeck door.
But the real culprits in all this are the GG management who acted so illegally and immorally that the social glue that holds us all together simply stopped working. Some of us make our living by flying aeroplanes, some by making sandwiches. But we should all be treated the same. In this case the sandwich makers got treated like slaves from a bygone era. That the ripples that this incident caused should affect the pilots has us all incensed. But if I had been told that LGW pilots had all been sacked whilst Polish pilots took their place then I would also have stopped working. If I was then hounded into a building and locked in by the police to be given a pre-printed notice of termination, then I too would be mighty, mighty pissed.
These poor workers may not be in our company but they are in our community. BA should be calling for heads of the board of GG to swing next to the heads of the union militants at the gallows of 27L.