The same with crew on older contracts. It would have been much cheaper merely to have bought them off with severance, plus all the associated damage to BA and its brand would have been saved. No instead, Willie had to use the big stick and now it is going to cost BA hundreds of millions more to pay for his mistakes.
BASSA refused to negotiate with BA in the beginning because they wanted to ensure that there would be no redundancies. The imposition of crew complement changes was done to ALLOW those who wanted to take VR to take it, with the associated 'deal'.
So where does the big stick come in? BASSA threw their toys out of the cot because of imposition starting the whole sorry mess.