Hi,
I am in the majority on this forum in being extremely anti the BASSA leadership. I believe that we cabin crew had to make our fair share of cuts to keep the airline going. I also believe that BA's way of making those cuts were better for us than BASSA's ideas and that BASSA should have negotiated sensibly (and accepted the MTP) to try to get new entrants flying with us on the same fleet.
Having got that out of the way, I would like to pick up Flybymerchant on a couple of his points in post 3240.
it is the best rewarded group in the entire airline per productive hour
Really? I will grant you that some cabin crew are paid far more than one would expect, but those are I believe a minority these days. Is the average crew member paid more per hour than the Leadership Team, pilots, IT consultants, each management grade etc? I have no idea what most "groups'" average pay is and I have no problem with whatever they are paid (well, except maybe the leadership team!), but I would be VERY surprised if cabin crew were the best paid per hour. Please give us some figures if you stand by this assertion.
losing one cabin crew member on a 747, from 15 to 14
Again, let me stress that I believe this was the best way to make the savings and I don't have a problem with it. I do believe it jeopardises customer service and I think we have fewer crew on our aircraft than most major airlines, but it is a way of saving money which doesn't impact on my take-home pay - and that is what is important to me. However, calling it losing one crew member out of 15 is being disingenuous. The plane is split into the cabins in which we work and the lost crew member has to come from one of those cabins. The actual impact of losing someone from the back of a 747 would be losing 1 out of 5; from Club would be 1 out of 3 or 4 etc depending on the aircraft; and from First would be 1 out of 3. If the CSD is free to work on a trolley then we don't have a problem - it is when the IFE etc needs constant attention that the service will suffer. This is a minority of the time, but does happen. I am just pointing out that calling it 1 out of 15 is misleading.
I only wrote this post because if we are going to accuse the BASSA leadership team of untruths then we have to be able to back up what we ourselves say; and I would dispute the assertion Flybymerchant made about cabin crew being the best paid per productive hour.