I am very much afraid that this dispute is ill-founded and has little hope of a successful conclusion for BASSA. The causes of the dispute and the aims of the resulting industrial action are ill-defined by BASSA and appear to be poorly understood by BASSA's membership. As a result, BASA has done an extremely poor job of preparing the public for this confrontation, and has made some grave
PR and negotiation errors in its handling of the dispute.
The result is that public opinion - even inside the industry - is moving from unsympathetic to positively hostile towards BASSA. Unfortunately, the general public will not differentiate between BASSA and BA Cabin Crew in general, and the fallout is likely to last for some time. There are plenty of people out there who remember the 1997 action and still regard BA CC poorly from that occasion.
If BASSA is to salvage anything from this, it needs to redefine its points of dispute and its aims, and should agree to ACAS being brought in. It also needs to do a bloody sight better job than it has of explaining to the public the causes of the obvious bad feeling within the BA CC community, and it will need to explain why it feels that its confrontational approach to resolving these issues needs to be so different from the less combative approach of the other unions involved. However, I feel it may already be too late.
As others have suggested, I get the feeling that the defeat BASSA will suffer at the hands of Willie Walsh will be devastating for BASSA's standing with their CC, and that far from improving things for BA CC, the result will be an imposition of non-negotiable and less-favourable Ts&Cs - and a mass defection to CC89.