British Airways - CC Industrial Relations Mk VI

[Caribbean Boy]

Another view

I thought I'd post another view of the strike.

The Waterside Disruption Centre (WDC) was activated last Tuesday to assist our contact centres in handling rebookings and refunds for pax whose flights had been cancelled. WDC is staffed solely by volunteers.

One the first day callers has two-hour waits to get through but by the afternoon this had been reduced to a few minutes. Most of them were quite understanding of the situation, though some were quite distresed.

We sometimes had real difficulties in rebooking pax to Domestic, European and some long-haul destinations such as MIA. However, during the next few days, more wet-lease flights became available (such as Ryanair between LGW and EDI, GLA and MAN) and more alternative carriers could be booked (such as United, Air France and KLM).

I also did a support shift today at T5. Contrary to what you may have read, it is not like a ghost town. Although pax numbers are certainly down, flights are operating and the operation was going well. There were 106 flights scheduled to depart today, 35 of which being operated by wet-lease carriers, namely Jet2, euroAtlantic airways, Titan Airways, Astreus, Transavia, Arkefly and Viking Airlines. We were then informed that three more flights (BA782 to ARN, BA287 to SFO and BA119 to BLR) were reinstated, making a total of 109 flights. Oh, just to make it clear, the wet-lease planes only do domestic and European flights. This means that by the end of today, 74 BA-crewed flights will leave T5.

I happened to be present at an operations briefing where we were told that some flights were delayed a bit as more cabin crew had reported for duty, so they replaced the volunteer crew (which took a bit of time to organise). Of course, more cabin crew enables BA to convert freighter flights back to passenger flights.

Actually, on the bus back to Waterside, we got chatting to a captain who had been rostered as CC for a 3-day trip but had been replaced by regular crew. He also said that BA had planned the revised scheduled on the assumption that 20 per cent of cabin crew would turn up for work, but now had too many crew, causing the volunteers to be sent home.

I'll post updates next week if people are interested.