British Airways vs. BASSA (current Airline Staff Only)

[Colonel White]

Time for another reality check...

'Most of the other employees have a union which not WW is after. Their union is not being busted by management.'

Um... we are talking about Unite, right ? After all, Whilst BASSA and CC89 are two groupings within Unite, neither group is able to cnduct separate negotiations with BA, All agreements have to be with Unite. If BA wanted to 'bust' Unite, surely this would have been manifest in previous negotiations with other bargaining groups, after all, there are some 15,000 Unite members who are not cabin crew working for BA. Oh, to save you the maths, that's half of the rest of us non-cabin crew staff.

'WW may be well-regarded by the board but it does not mean that he is well-regarded by the workforce.'

Not true. Have you been to any of the staff forums he's been at ? OK so not a lot of people fit in the Waterside theatre - can't remember the seating capacity but it's several hundred. Never seen him fail to get everyone onside. I come from the land of bean-counters (Finance & Performance). The only time there was disquiet about the way that the company was being run was when the major reshuffle took place. The way that was done was counter to the way that BA had reorganised in the past. That said, what was needed was decisive action and the old way of a more concensus based decision making would have taken too long. Better to bite the bullet.


'A majority means nothing. A majority can be wrong.'

Yes, very true. Once upon a time, the majority view was that the earth was flat and if you went far enough you'd fall off the edge. What disproved that was hard, evidence based, logical reasoning. Sadly, the noises coming from BASSA are none of this.

Why was the strike action so ineffectual ? Look at the numbers. Now I'm led to believe that the current cabin crew workforce is around 13,000 folk. Of this number, 10,000 are Unite members. Of this 10,000 about 6,000 voted for strike action. So before you get down to the number who will walk as opposed to just vote, there are probably slightly more people who didn't vote for strike action than did. For a strike to be effective, you need to be able to guarantee that at least 75% of the workforce will down tools. BASSA never got anywhere near that figure. Now, look at it from the individual's perspective. They may have voted for strike action, but when they found that the likelihood was that the company would still run a successful operation, it saps the resolve. It's even tougher when you work out that there isn't the mass support that the union is trumpeting. As soon as it was abundantly clear that at best Unite had got only the support of 60% of its members, strike action was doomed to fail.

Why was the support not stronger ? Maybe the '12 days at Xmas' had something to do with it. Maybe the fact that crew were working to the new numbers and found it not that much tougher contributed. Now Unite can call for another ballot on another cause, but unless it's something which impacts all cabin crew and not just benefits a few, I can't see it being a rip-roaring success - although I could be wrong. Put it like this, if the action had happened in my area and I had previously voted for strike action, but for whatever reason had elected to work normally and was now presented with the reasons that Unite are putting forward for further IA, I'd vote it down.