Yup. The most recent rant:
The “old boys club”.
Sexism and gender bias, bordering on the misogynistic, is alive and well in Waterside.
The cabin crew dispute has proven many things, one of which is that male dominated cronyism still flourishes behind Waterside’s gleaming fa�ade. Beneath a thin veneer of spin, platitudes and trite PC sound bites, lurks a far darker truth.
A predominantly female workforce had the audacity to stand up for themselves and have an opinion and one that the last bastions of male dominance didn’t like.
These people stood up for themselves, for their rights, to protect the families they had, or the ones that they planned to have in the future. They dared to say that “we deserve better than this; we are worth more” and this simple defiance appeared to offend the Waterside establishment.
It appeared that many of our mainly male pilot colleagues could not accept this: adopting a “upstart trolley dollies should be seen and not heard” approach. Women and mothers attempting to interfere with their destiny, having a say in their own lives was apparently an unthinkable heresy!
BALPA and PPRUNE websites were, and still are, full of veiled and often overt, bigoted indignation. Not only that, but a significant number of all the disciplinary action taken against crew had one common element, either as witness, victim or instigator -
A specific male BALPA rep.
To be fair many pilots have expressed disgust and disappointment over BALPA’s stance towards the cabin crew dispute, so much for kind words, they have failed to back these words with their actions, the same individual has recently been elected once again by the same pilot community to continue to represent them.
Many pilots went against all the fundamental principles of trade unionism, setting up a volunteer system and an alternate union, in the PCCC, to undermine any stance or action that crew could take. This unhealthy obsession with our dispute led some members of flight deck to go so far as to attend the numerous court cases surrounding our dispute, openly congratulating the BA legal team if they won.
Strong women were not only mocked but also pilloried on flight deck forums, branded dismissively as ‘militants’, none more so than your chairwoman, Lizanne Malone. Our supposed ‘colleagues’ were so concerned at this apparent threat to world order, that not only did they not support the cabin crew, they could not even bring themselves to remain neutral, many of them fell over themselves to “back BA” or to involve a salivating Asset Protection department, in trivial imagined slights.
The union representative for the vast majority of dispute related cases was a woman, representing predominantly female crew. The rep in question was Nicky Marcus, a polite, intelligent and articulate woman. She was sacked for being a good rep. Managers alleged that she was somehow threatening and intimidating towards the head of Asset Protection. A man who had spent a long career in the Metropolitan Police, coming into contact with hardened drug dealers, murderers and violent offenders prior to joining British Airways. Obviously this had not prepared him for his exposure to the ‘intimidating’ Nicky Marcus.
It would appear that cabin crew, and by de facto, predominantly women, had to be kept in their place at any cost.
BALPA’s crass intervention in our dispute was essentially a case of people whose earnings can be well in excess of £100k per year with pensions to match, telling colleagues that could earn less than a tenth of that, with a poverty line pension, not only actively telling people they should bow down and accept it but also willingly assisting an employer be able to introduce this gross distortion.
It wasn’t that long ago they wanted our help in helping to protect them from the threat of cheap pilots being used through open skies, how ironic are their current actions when we face the same threat. Next time they ask the answer will be a polite but firm
Fox Trot Oscar.