Storm clouds a-comin'Well, okay. On the surface this headline is overblown. But the plight of those 900,000 passengers who are booked to fly on British Airways between December 22 and January 2, 2010 is that they have been targeted as the victims of the airline’s flight attendants. On Monday the attendants’ trade union, Unite, said that after a ballot their members were going on strike—nicely timed for one of the biggest holiday seasons of the year.
Make no mistake, that’s where the real power of the union lies, in its ability to wreck the travel plans of so many people. The effect of this strike will be worldwide. Brits themselves take long vacations at year’s end, to many destinations ranging from the ski slopes of Switzerland to the beaches of the South Pacific. But a network as extensive as BA’s catches many others in its web, including a lot of Americans, many of whom are booked on BA’s code-sharing partner, American Airlines.
The flight attendants’ grievances include the fact that BA is cutting
its number on long haul flights by one—that’s right, one, from 15 to
14—as well as contract changes, some job cuts and a proposed two-year
wage freeze.
There is a long and miserable history behind this conflict. The airline was created from two national state-owned carriers, British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) and British European Airways (BEA). In 1987 British Airways, the combination of both, was privatized.
When they were state airlines, BOAC and BEA had—like a lot of other national flag carriers—bloated staffs and notoriously antsy trade unions. At first, privatization made little difference to this. For example, at Heathrow the baggage handlers continued to work under rules of manning and hours that not only sustained the practices of the separate state airlines but were also incompatible, causing countless skirmishes in which bags were delayed or lost as they were being transferred between the long haul and European flights.
The management of BA itself was also keen to protect the regime of high fares that they had thought was a universal right. They effectively blocked cut-price competition, notably across the Atlantic when threatened by an upstart called Skytrain and they consistently tried to disparage the man who became their most effective competitor, Richard Branson of Virgin Atlantic.
This toxic combination of bloody-minded unions and cartel-hugging managers persisted even after deregulation in the U.S. and, ultimately into the liberalization of European air routes in which the budget carriers have thrived. More recently, successive heads of BA have tried to change their games to get on a more competitive basis, but the current chief executive, Willie Walsh, has had to cope as well with the additional hit of the worst slump in travel for years.
For the first half of 2009 BA lost $345m. Walsh has no choice but to cut where he can—and where, he hopes, the cuts won’t show up in visible declines in the quality of service. Given the belligerence of the flight attendants, he now has a major showdown on his hands.
BA cabin crew earn twice as much as their counterparts at Virgin, and anybody who has flown on both airlines knows that there is nothing slack in the service on Virgin. Indeed, Virgin has successfully styled itself as the Not-BA by creating a hip atmosphere in the cabin. The BA cabins may not be hip, but they have always been efficiently run and, despite the history, there is also a spirit of Not-Virgin that conveys depths of experience of skill.
It’s appalling that the staff who have the most direct responsibility for the care of passengers are the same people who are prepared to bring misery to them in this way. A strike is a crude instrument that frequently ends up delivering self-inflicted wounds to those who wield it. In this case, sadly, neither side seems able or willing to do the right thing and talk it through together long enough to discover the realities of the world they inhabit, rather than blame each other for forces that neither controls.
One thing is for sure, if this strike goes ahead there will be a lot of people who will never fly BA again.
There is a long and miserable history behind this conflict. The airline was created from two national state-owned carriers, British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) and British European Airways (BEA). In 1987 British Airways, the combination of both, was privatized.
When they were state airlines, BOAC and BEA had—like a lot of other national flag carriers—bloated staffs and notoriously antsy trade unions. At first, privatization made little difference to this. For example, at Heathrow the baggage handlers continued to work under rules of manning and hours that not only sustained the practices of the separate state airlines but were also incompatible, causing countless skirmishes in which bags were delayed or lost as they were being transferred between the long haul and European flights.
The management of BA itself was also keen to protect the regime of high fares that they had thought was a universal right. They effectively blocked cut-price competition, notably across the Atlantic when threatened by an upstart called Skytrain and they consistently tried to disparage the man who became their most effective competitor, Richard Branson of Virgin Atlantic.
This toxic combination of bloody-minded unions and cartel-hugging managers persisted even after deregulation in the U.S. and, ultimately into the liberalization of European air routes in which the budget carriers have thrived. More recently, successive heads of BA have tried to change their games to get on a more competitive basis, but the current chief executive, Willie Walsh, has had to cope as well with the additional hit of the worst slump in travel for years.
For the first half of 2009 BA lost $345m. Walsh has no choice but to cut where he can—and where, he hopes, the cuts won’t show up in visible declines in the quality of service. Given the belligerence of the flight attendants, he now has a major showdown on his hands.
BA cabin crew earn twice as much as their counterparts at Virgin, and anybody who has flown on both airlines knows that there is nothing slack in the service on Virgin. Indeed, Virgin has successfully styled itself as the Not-BA by creating a hip atmosphere in the cabin. The BA cabins may not be hip, but they have always been efficiently run and, despite the history, there is also a spirit of Not-Virgin that conveys depths of experience of skill.
It’s appalling that the staff who have the most direct responsibility for the care of passengers are the same people who are prepared to bring misery to them in this way. A strike is a crude instrument that frequently ends up delivering self-inflicted wounds to those who wield it. In this case, sadly, neither side seems able or willing to do the right thing and talk it through together long enough to discover the realities of the world they inhabit, rather than blame each other for forces that neither controls.
One thing is for sure, if this strike goes ahead there will be a lot of people who will never fly BA again.
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