A union rep has just told me that the strike was called off 'cos the co told them at a meeting yest that they had enough crew to run an almost perfect schedule.
With regard to other departments comparing themselves to us, its a completely different kettle of fish. As someone has already said, when things go well, all of our jobs are a breeze, when things go wrong that's when the nightmare begins and that happens to us ALL irrespective of where we work. The comment re the crew on a 10 hour flight doing 3 or 4 hours work tops, well that is a rarity but yes it does happen. But there are many many flights like the one that I have just done where we had an ill pax onboard and that took 2 crew out of the service to assist, we ran out of meals before all pax had been served, we had no IFE through the whole aircraft and it was turbulent and that was a 9 hour flight full full full! So please don't assume that our lives are a breeze, we work very hard as do other departments.
Having said that, it's up to every department to fight for what they feel they deserve. As someone else has quite rightly said, we are still second from the bottom of the list when it comes to pay for UK based airline staff and that's nothing to be proud of, especially for a company with VS's reputation! Let me just remind you as well that VS will do whatever it takes to save money in any way they can. Whilst this is good in some respects, in other's it is not! Remember that they laid off all of our ground staff overseas some years ago despite some of them having worked for us for many many years, the ground staff that now represent us, are employed through an outside company and cause no end of problems as they have no interest in the company or their work. Try flying in and out of NYC (both airports) a few times and you'll see what I mean. Please also remember that one of the reasons we have more national crew on our flights than any other airline, is because they are cheaper than uk based crew especially the Indian Crew who earn a third of what a junior crew member earns! We only need national crew for language purposes according to the CAA yet our flights have more national crew than UK based crew!!