Shah,
responding to your points. As others have pointed out, by all accounts the take-up by non-union cabin crew of the deal on offer was pretty much 100%. Anyone in the union was bound by the collective decision of the members. The law expressly forbids BA from attempting to reduce union membership by offering inducements. Hence only those staff who were not members of the union could take up the offer. Perhaps you could direct me to evidence of these alleged union busting techniques deployed by BA. I do hope you are not referring to the usual BASSA puff stuff, full of dodgy assumptions, white lies and omissions.
Regarding the 100% schedule. Willie Walsh is no fool. He knows that having announced that BA will run a 100% longhaul schedule, that is precisely what the travelling public will expect. Failure to deliver would rebound badly on the brand. Thus it has to indicate the degree of confidence he has in the numbers of cabin crew who will ignore any strike call plus VCC plus Mixed fleet.
As far as the consultative ballot goes, nobody can say for certain who voted which way - that's the point of a secret ballot. However, the fact that less than half of those balloted actually voted suggests that either insufficient time was allowed for the ballot process, or papers were lost or not sent to the correct address, or over half the crew have simply had enough and want someone else to make the decision for them. Now two out of the three reasons I put forward were within BASSA's area of control. Let's look at BASSA's number for strikers. They claim that 7,000+ people walked out. So how come under half that number voted to reject the deal. You would have thought that if they were that incensed, then all 7000 odd would have voted to reject. Doesn't that sound a little strange ? I suggest that there may be many crew who rely on staff travel to get to work who probably didn't get ballot papers in time. They include those who lost their staff travel as well as those who worked through the strike. So your assertion that these folk are holding firm doesn't quite add up, does it ?
Juan Tugoh has very eloquently covered the point on the potential for strikers to be sacked. BASSA made the crucial mistake of broadening the basis for the last industrial action. They have no ammunition left now and consequently will struggle to put forward a viable basis for any future action. Perhaps the time has arrived for fresh leadership elections.
On that note I see that BASSA have displayed their usual outstanding inefficiency regarding nominations for the General Secretary of Unite. I believe the call for an extraordinary meeting went out today for a session to be held at noon on Friday. The nominations close at noon on Monday. Wonderful considering the paperwork for this was sent out in June. I can't quite work out whether this is a further display of ineptitude, arrogance that the executive didn't believe it needed to ballot members (especially as the recent flyer said that the branch supports Len McCluskey ) or an attempt to rig the result by the executive by allowing insufficient notice.