The Horsell's Mouth Politics, pedantry and personal interests

A sad tail: BA's staff and pensions have become more powerful than it's airline function

I’ve never been very good on aeroplanes, as my family will attest. I don’t how it came about but I have suffered a deep-rooted fear of flying for as long as I can remember and it’s got worse as I’ve got older. The one airline that I felt some degree of safety on, some gamut of re-assurance with, was British Airways. Not sure why, it was just familiar, consistent – there didn’t seem to be any nasty surprises and it had (and still has) an excellent safety record.

It is fair to say that during the last 10 years it has become something quite different to what it was. The level of service is meagre and customers are generally treated as a bit of a nuisance in an airline run by and for the convenience of BA staff. It is quite a tragedy to see such a great institution indulge itself into oblivion – but that is the way it is going. The cabin crew decision to strike over Christmas is the latest two-fingered salute to the paying British public – and possibly the greatest since Gerald Ratner insulted his clientele by admitting his products were “crap”.

It could also go down – at 92.4% as Unite leaders keep telling us - as the most decisive corporate suicide note in history.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a strike-breaking Tory. I believe people have the right to withhold their Labour – more than that, I believe it is an essential buffer between extreme grievance and revolution. But I don’t understand what this strike is for – cabin staff are not taking a pay cut, they are not being made redundant, they are not even working extra hours (although they may have to do more in those hours; but at the moment, who doesn’t?) It seems to me that this grotesque posturing is more about Len McLuskey and his place in the Unite union than any genuine grievance cabin staff have. They earn twice as much at BA than elsewhere – senior staff earn more than £50k for goodness’ sake – and if you like flying, I would have thought that being cabin crew is a great job.

I have nothing against BA staff - a lot of them are great people and without the special attention of one or two, it is no exaggeration to say that there are some flights that I just wouldn’t have got on. BA management too seems hell-bent on learning absolutely nothing from past experience.

But there are some very pertinent letter in the Daily Telegraph that sum everything up nicely. If the cabin crew strike over Christmas, they may all be out of a job within six months because BA could quite easily fold and a government bail-out would be tricky – can we really argue that a flag-carrying airline is as important as the banking system? And if the unions win their battle, how else is the company going to cut costs to pull itself back from losses of £400million?

The “plane fact” is that unless BA cuts its costs without being seen to cut its quality, it’s future looks very bleak indeed. It’s time that its staff – all of them – brought their heads back down out of the clouds and understood the bigger picture. If they choose to bring the company crashing down around them for the sake of their own personal comfort, I don’t see how that is different behaviour from the bankers we’ve all been told to despise so much.

Update 17/12: It is difficult not to feel that poetic as well as judicial justice has been done today.