Airline passenger news and views

I decided to visit the BA cabin crew picket line. Not my best idea, but enlightening nevertheless.

Chatting to the people, it was very hard to correlate these individuals with the service industry in which they worked.  Many seemed to lack the interpersonal skills that I would expect of a cabin-crew member.

My guess is that we are now reaching the end of the strike. There seems little support for further strikes during the summer and many strikers are counting the personal costs of lost pay (and perks). The people manning the picket are the hard-core, more interested in the principle and politics of the action than in safeguarding jobs or even having an employer to go back to.

To put things in perspective, I did hear some well-argued points about BA’s intransigence and the destruction of their jobs and working conditions. Having had it so good for so many years it is damned unfair to be asked to give it up now. I wanted to say “get real” but I also wanted to get home in one piece.

The hard truth is that BA staff have been well paid, many will say the best paid in the industry. The even harder truth is that the aviation market has changed and  passengers, including business travellers, are having to put up with lower-cost travel options.

For BA, there came a somewhat late realisation that they were over-staffed in the wrong areas. Economic survival dictated that BA reduce cabin crew ratios. Probably, BA handled it badly. I have no evidence of this but there were a lot of moderate strikers in the beginning and so one suspects that it could have been done better.

For the cabin crew, the strike has been a disaster. BA has effectively won. They are operating an increasing percentage of flights and one must expect them now to turn the screw on the strikers.

So, why did I go? Call it the Greenham Common effect – I can tell my grand kids that I was there, or maybe it was the anniversary of the miners’ strike and Arthur Scargill’s last hurrah. This strike is one more death blow to the collective bargaining process but I can say that I saw the embers still glowing.

I came away sorry for the cabin crew and sorry for their working colleagues. I was also sorry for British Airways and its long-suffering customers. Most of all, I was angry – I was just no sure who to blame.