From The Telegraph at the weekend:
Unions should look on the bright side of life - Telegraph
Monty Python’s Life of Brian is the favourite film of BA chief executive Willie Walsh. So how appropriate that Unite, that misnomer of a trade union, is putting on a scene just for him.
Tony Woodley, who is this week leading 11,000 BA flight crew to another strike ballot, seems hell-bent on reproducing Scene 8: The Grumpy People’s Front of Judea.
You remember. John Cleese, in the Reg role, asked if he’s from the Judean People’s Front. His two-word response is memorably Anglo Saxon, before he explains: “The only people we hate more than the Romans are the ------- Judean People’s Front.” That’s excepting, of course, the Judean Popular People’s Front.
Over at Unite, it’s a familiar script, no doubt inspired by the line that “any anti-imperialist group like ours must reflect... a divergence of interests within its power base”. Unite is the product of coupling the Transport and General Workers Union with Amicus. Both wings have their own crew branch – the T&G’s militant British Airlines Stewards and Stewardesses Association; and Cabin Crew 89 from Amicus.
Trying to control them is the T&G’s Woodley – and Amicus’s retiring Derek Simpson, the other joint-general secretary. Simpson, you may recall, is the Twitterer who sent “I am at Wembley for England match” – just as a BA strike began in May.
“Dysfunctional” is Walsh’s term for this lot, with whom he has been negotiating since February 2009. But don’t ask him, ask Sir Christopher Holland – the judge who ruled that BA did not break contracts when it cut cabin crew on long-haul flights from 15 to 14.
“Ostensibly, representation is by this single union,” Holland wrote in his judgment. “However – again at all material times – the old allegiances have held sway, engendering from time to time, mutual rivalry, hostility and mistrust”. He noted how “the Bassa and Amicus factions were separately represented and sat in separate rooms”. Once, they had a “heated argument”.