Incredulous!
I am a new contributor to this forum but have watched the BA strike and the PPrune forums relating to it with interest and a mounting sense of incredulity. At the beginning I was bemused by the over-reaction to the company's decision to remove one staff member at a time of major cutbacks and world recession. Were they not just managing in difficult times as best as they could? I thought they did rather well as no-one seemed to lose their job unless they wanted to and no-one seemed to have a pay cut (although it now seems that other branches of the airline HAVE taken pay cuts)
I then felt slightly sorry for the cabin crew who seemed to me to being completely mislead by some very selfish union reps who I could only surmise had their own agenda. I have since learned from these forums that a lot of the reps are apparently the ones who were affected by these changes so a BIT of self interest there perhaps?
I lost a lot of sympathy when I saw the ridiculous displays from Bedfont where you have supposedly underpaid workers with flashy cars drinking Pimms with their children being provided for with bouncy castles and the like as if they were on a day out in the sunshine rather than striking for a genuine cause. I also thought it irresponsible for these parents to be parading their children in this way. With the sheer amount of obviously unsympathetic responses from the rest of the company, the media and the general public, I am staggered that this strike has ANY cabin crew at all who still support it. Yet reading some of the posts on the cabin crew forum from AVA Hannah (and her predecessors who seem to have taken a back seat now) I am dumbfounded!! AVA Hannah apparently lives in S Africa and commutes to Heathrow!! I thought it was bad that Liz Maloney lived in US but this is getting silly!! No wonder BA are in trouble!! How can these staff afford to do this? This is a job that you would expect to find being done by unskilled manual workers. It requires a few WEEKS of training!! Even with subsidised travel I would not expect to see even qualified professionals like nurses, teachers and social workers (who complete a 3 YEAR training) commute from so far afield. The cabin crew earn FAR too much if they can afford to do this. And now AVA Hannah thinks it is a disgrace because she has had to buy a ticket for £500 because she has lost the subsidised travel that enabled her to get to her (quite obviously overpaid) job having been warned in advance that this is what would happen. I really do not understand what calibre of staff BA have if they cannot work out that it was perhaps a bit foolish to go on strike in these circumstances.
So are these people brainwashed? Is this the sort of mentality that allows cults to thrive? I reckon a psychologist would have a field day!! It's all a bit much for me to work out. I can't decide if these crew need medical help, an education or a kick up the backside!!
What IS really going on here? I read somewhere that a lot of the strikers are Hobby Jobbers (lovely term!) and that they have great part-time contracts that mean that they hardly go to work at all anyway and other incomes so are not dependent on their incomes from BA. If this is the case, this continuing dispute is just plainly immoral because there are thousands of BA staff who are working hard to try to make up for the actions of these few. They DO have families who are dependent on their salaries from BA (unlike those parading their children at Bedfont) and will really suffer if BA go under.
So all in all I have decided that it is this latter category that I need to support and so will continue to fly BA just so the likes of AVA Hannah do not succeed in jeopardising the futures of the rest of the company. So this is one passenger (not keen on the SLF terminology by the way. I think it is disrespectful!) who is still, despite the best efforts of the few, Backing BA!!