continuing on...
Voting NO does not necessarily mean that industrial action is inevitable. There is another way - where pilots continue working and the aircraft keep on flying.
The pilots council and BALPA would need to take the initiative and check the applicable employment and trade union law, but what if...
... the pilots vote NO to the ballot and resist any change to their present terms and conditions of contract until a fair and workable pay deal and rostering agreement has been negotiated with management? The law needs to be checked, but this would mean that if the company attempted to impose their own revised pay deal then the pilots (BALPA members or not), en masse, would refuse these conditions. The company would have 2 options. Firstly, to agree to retain the status quo until the matter was resolved or, secondly, with an impasse it could revoke the contracts of ALL of its pilots. This would of course mean no pilots employed, no pilots insured to fly the aircraft, no operation - end of story, company dead in the water, finito!
Nah! Uncle Ray wouldn't want that.
So we all go happily along until the matter is resolved. But, I hear you say, what about the timescale. Well we have waited this long and I don't think another few months of waiting is going to make all that much difference if a workable pay deal can be defined.
One drawback of course for the pilots would be no pay rise until the matter had be resolved. Another would be no base changes until an agreement had been reached.
... oh! and I almost forgot, because the terms and conditions of employment would be 'frozen' there would be no type conversions onto the brand new, very expensive, future-of-the-company-depends-on-them shiny Airbus fleet. Now Ray Webster would find it extremely difficult to explain to the company's backers why, as the weeks went by, the airports in the South of England began looking more and more like aircraft graveyards with Airbus aircraft sitting on the ground gathering dust. The backers might think that he and the 40 thieves (sorry management team) were ineffective. You probably think that this is unlikely to happen. I agree. But the threat of having many hundreds of millions of pounds worth of investors money sitting idly on the ground is what Ray Webster is afraid of - his Achilles Heel. It would leave him isolated, vulnerable and open to accusations of mismanagement.
Positive action following a NO vote would define precisely want had to be achieved and set a clearly defined agenda in terms of both timescale and financial incentive for this matter to be resolved. This is not blackmail - it is negotiation between management and the workforce but with both parties being equal in the conciliation process - both have much to gain and both much to lose. The only way forward (as usual in these situations - yawn) is for management and employees to work together and not be at loggerheads with each other - to reach agreement for the MUTUAL benefit of the parties and principally for the continued success of the airline on which all of our prosperities depend.
... as for the media - well Mr Webster could hardly go back cap in hand to his pet paper The Guardian saying that all was not as it should be. It was he (allegedly) who leaked the story that the strike was off in the first place. Difficult now to retract that statement because any industrial action would be seen (or could be 'spun') as being pre-emptied by an unfair management imposing their terms and conditions on the workforce!!! (oh dear!)
... and if he tried to employ pilots from outside the airline, I can see the notice in "Flight International" and "The Log" already (as was the case in the Cathay Pacific dispute) - 'due to the continuing dispute between pilots and management prospective applicants are advised not to submit an application to this airline until they have sought advice ...'
... gets down off his orange box and thinks 'is this only a dream?' or is it time to thrust a radical iron fist in the air and look positively towards a bright orange dawn ... a wry smile crosses his face as he thinks there just might be a feasible alternative to a 'yes' vote ...
