Re-Heat
when comparing average hourly costs between fleets and airlines it should be noted that the average age of employees is greatly different between LHR crews and the rest ie LGW EASY VA etc who are bound to cost less as they are younger and have been with their respective companies for less tim
True, but it is what it is, and BA does not operate in a vacuum. It operates with those other airlines in a competitive marketplace. Of course, their staff may age and go up in seniority and pay, or not - depending on whether they have seniority.
Hence why BA wants nil seniority on new fleet as well.
Neither you nor I can change the market - it is what it is, hence the need to find some way to compete at or approaching those cost levels.
Rightly or wrongly, this is part of BA's problem. Too many crew have seen it as a "career" rather than a "job". BA is one of few companies where the majority of crew stay for the long term rather than a couple of years. While this has certain benefits to BA, they are likely outweighed by the negative of an inflated pay scale.
I don't think that is so much of an issue as compared to how it is managed - certainly a lot of the young girls joining BOAC in the 50s and 60s didn't expect to stay for 40 years, but lifestyles and job changed. Short of causing enormous disruption by novating contracts to non-seniority contracts similar to newer airlines while appealing would, actually, destroy much of the financial stability that people would by then have built up.
So, the answer is to find some way to mitigate the impact on people while building a sustainable cost base for the future. That is, what I think, BA was trying to do, but in being so intransigent, BASSA have simply created the seeds of their own destruction as the airline see the clear sense in eliminating the entire high-pay portion of the community in one fell swoop.
But the airline would not have reached that thinking if the union had in fact negotiated outside of the vacuum of the Fortress Heathrow.