Wishful Thinking,
It's an interesting scenario and perhaps it all boils down to how long it trains to do each job. Sadly for striking cabin crew, it takes 3 days for a pilot to train to do their job and only 3 weeks to train anybody else.
This puts cabin crew in a very weak bargaining position - something BASSA might have factored in to their negotiating stance, IMHO. Nobody is indispensable. As someone wrote elsewhere, even JFK was replaced in under and hour, and he was the most powerful man on the planet.