BASSA's latest missive, posted at #6595 on the other preceding thread (now closed), is a tour de force in untruths - plain and simple.
Firstly, we need to clearly state that the legal injunction received by British Airways was absolutely and categorically nothing to do with the legality of the issues over which the ballot was held ....
Wrong! BASSA broke the law by allowing members, who were taking voluntary redundancy, to ballot for a strike which would be called for
after those members had left the company. That is illegal! You can only ballot members who have a direct interest in the the strike and its outcome.
BASSA had a copy of a spreadsheet (info regarding union members and salary deductions) and that included the names and leaving date (30 November 2009) of all BASSA members who were taking that voluntary redundancy, and Liz Malone had personally seen it. BA warned Unite that it was risking invalidating the ballot. Someone asked on the BASSA forums if a person taking VR could vote - Liz Malone
personally replied on the forum, that such people could vote. Malone screwed up! Despite being warned at least once in person, and twice in writing, by BA, Unite chose not to ensure that BASSA members taking VR were given a clear warning
not to vote. Unite screwed up! Between them, Malone and Unite transgressed the law, as clearly stated in the judgement.
This task is always difficult, as many people don’t keep their details, address etcetera up to date on our records, and any discrepancy, believe it or not, is potential grounds for a challenge.
If BASSA and/or it's members can't be arsed with keeping the records accurate, that sends a clear signal about apathy for detail. The devil is in the detail and if you don't look after the detail it bites you on the bum!
However, this particular ballot was made even more difficult due to the fact that approximately 800 people were taking severance during the actual ballot. The union had no way of knowing who these people were and when/if they had decided to accept their offers and leave.
British Airways declined to provide that information.
Wrong again! The spreadsheet mentioned already provided that information (see above). Malone and BASSA didn't bother to do anything with it.
Legal advice indicated that as they were employed at the time of the ballot and as their leaving date/offer was not guaranteed, they were entitled to vote; therefore excluding them could, in itself, be grounds for a legal challenge.
Bad luck on using poor legal advice! The law is pretty darn clear.
Our QC - one of the most respected experts in industrial law - was confident that the inclusion or indeed exclusion, had not affected the ballot in any significant way; after all, the disputed number was only some 800 people and over 9514 people had supported the yes vote, with just 772 voting no - a 92.49% unequivocal vote.
Irrelevant! The law was broken even if one person taking redundancy was allowed to vote! Law broken, so
entire ballot invalid. And law was broken by incompetents who, despite several clear warnings, chose to do nothing about it. That problem of attention to detail, again.
On top of that, the union had worked very hard to ensure that our lists were as accurate as possible, given that is was an almost impossible task to individually identify these people.
Utter nonsense - BASSA and Liz Mallone had a spreadsheet from BA which had a leaving date of 30 November 2009 against the names of those leaving. So, BASSA didn't work very hard at all, did they?
Virtually all of the media’s own legal correspondents universally agreed that BA had no case, yet somehow they won; most experts were astonished.
Really? No empirical evidence provided for that sweeping statement. Has BASSA and Unite counted up all the opinions of the legal correspondents and experts and found an astonished majority? Utter tripe!
The vilification that crew suffered was simply outrageous; most of it deliberately induced and inspired by our own management who were more than willing to publish misleading and inflated salaries and comparisons, to assist and actively encourage this false reporting with an unprecedented “dirty tricks” style campaign.
I think you'll find that the 'Yes' voters brought that upon
themselves. Unfortunately, the 'No' voters and non-union members will get lumped together with the militants. And BASSA militants forget that that they are first-rate at vilifying any in the cabin crew community who don't toe their outrageous line. Pot calling kettle!
They even went so far as to leak personal details to The Daily Mail, in an attempt to smear your Chairperson and other reps.
Conveniently forgetting that this info could have
easily come from the disaffected within their own community.
They say the first casualty of war is truth, and this has proven to be the case.
Spot on! BASSA and Unite are the biggest source of untruths going at the moment. All the above refers!
Public support would have been nice and we didn’t get it, ....
If we had received more public support, ....
Hysterical! Vote for a 12-day strike over Christmas and New Year, and you want support and sympathy? Who do BASSA and Unite think they are? Unbelievable! Since when did the public owe that to you?
Unite has already notified British Airways of our intention to re-ballot at the beginning of January; the process will be arranged during the Christmas break and database checking will take place, through the night if required.
Well, if it was that simple, why wasn't it done with the first ballot? Incompetents.
Plenty of confirmatory evidence in this latest BASSA scribbling of the root of the problem - that it is
never BASSA's fault. It is always everbody else's fault - the law's fault, the court/judge's fault, or a dirty tricks campaign by the company, or some such other hallucination. BASSA and Unite are never going to get anywhere
until they take some clear responsibility for their own serious, and very public, shortcomings.
(And as for reporting pilots to BASSA for telling the public that the strike is off - good grief! Just goes to show the level of the idiots the company is dealing with.)