Sorry- you really need a sense of how arcaic what your saying really is. The beancounters have been cutting away at crew terms and conditions for the last 30 years. At some point they have to expect a stand. whether its at Virgin, BA, United, American, Ryan or wherever. At some point crews have to put their own lives ahead of these disgusting management bonuses.
I don't think you understand; regardless of what you think of management bonuses (which are relatively small compared to what you are used to in the US), BA is hampered by contracts that have evolved from the days of BOAC / BEA and predecessor airlines.
Before even starting with the disruption agreement, which is largely used by the union to extract maximum allowances to the detriment of getting home (before even the customers are considered), let me explain it thus:
- Flight crews spend more time in the air but less total time at work than cabin crews on the European fleets - whereby flight crews take the same aircraft back out at London, cabin crews spend inordinate amounts of time on the ground at London, leaving one aircraft and then boarding another far later.
It is not to the detriment of crews to eliminate that inefficiency (which was validly created by BEA to allow crews to be fed, before on-board galleys existed), and would allow them to get home earlier to spend more time with their families. Pay would not even change.
Allowances are highly variable and cause people to game the system, and create huge back office inefficiency in their complex calculation. Again, as other employee groups did, replacing them with a monthly travel payment (taxed at a lower rate than salary), crews do not lose out.
Similarly, complex allowances had valid grounding when stewardesses were left in remote locations for a week, and needed a higher allowance to survive while awaiting the subsequent freighter rotation than someone on a one-nightstop trip to Manchester - now, with few long layovers, they are obsolete as the flying is mare more even across the workforce.
Understand this, and you will understand where management are trying to drag the airline.
If course, you are totally right that if all the crew left the job and stayed together, a strike would be effective. Without clarity over what the strike is about, compounded by union misdirection and lying, it simply won't succeed. Shot in the foot basically.