I gather the employer/employee relationship at Heathrow has been at an all time low across the board (not just BA staff) for quite some time: pay and conditions squabbling seems to be an endpoint when quality of work is down the crapper, so you try to compensate by getting a better renumeration deal. That's the way it seems to have worked where I am. The catering company (american headed, I think, hence their rather heavy handed approach) sacked 500 odd people in 2 hours, and I'd imagine everybody working in terminal 1 knows each other. The knock on effects of BA staff striking in sympathy show a level of militancy in the staff at heathrow which can only come from employers either being total arseholes or "taking tough decisions" like Eddington has had to in the last 3 years (shed 18,000 jobs at BA). Either way, there's more to this than the employees just deciding to throw down their tools in a miner type fashion mate...

I nearly got lynched at Heathrow when flying up to Edinburgh 2 years ago: just at the point the BA strike broke out then over a swipe card attendance system. Sounds like a similar situation...

And I'm confused about the news reports regarding holidaymakers: terminal 1 is a scheduled flight terminal: long-haul scheduled flights go out of there, sure, but no "package" deals... businessmen will be more inconvenienced!

All fairish points, but none of it changes the one simple fact: these people aren't striking against their employer; they're striking against someone else's employer. The company their strike is hurting is not the company whose behaviour they want to influence. This strike can have no good outcome, even by the strikers' definition of "good", other than to give them all a nice wee break.


> The catering company ... sacked 500 odd people in 2 hours

After asking them for days to come back to work.

Why didn't they resign en-masse instead of breaking their contracts?

Forgot to say earlier, Andy: I'm puzzled by your point about scheduled flights versus package deals. I use scheduled flights to go on holiday, and, when I do, the planes are full of other people going on holiday, especially at this time of year. I've even been on a package deal that used scheduled flights. Not all holiday-makers are going to the Costa Del Sol to get pissed, watch Sky, and shag waiters, you know. Some of them are going to Greece.


Rob,

Wouldn't their contracts specify a minimum period of notice? Therefore, wouldn't resigning en masse and walking out that day constitute breaking their contracts?

Firstly if Gate Gourmet were not able to manage the business they should have resigned their contract and got into another business
Secondly but for the strike we would never have addressed the strikers problems
basically bad business sense at work
no wonder they had to strike
FreeTrader

Were Gate Gourmet not able to manage their business? Why do you say that? Because they sacked some people or because they were faced with a strike? Don't see how either of those things implies an inability to run the business myself. Bad management, maybe, but total inability to the extent that they should have just given up? Incidentally, that would have led to all 2600 workers being made redundant instead of just 600 being sacked. That would have been better, would it?


> no wonder they had to strike

No wonder who had to strike? I've not written a word against the Gate Gourmet strikers — not studied their case in any real depth, but their colleagues certainly were sacked and they're entitled to react to that however they like. BA's strikers, on the other hand, absolutely did not have to strike, any more than I did. They had literally no demands of their employers.

BTW, watching the BBC World News coverage of this from Amsterdam at the weekend, the BBC reporter on the scene (some bald bloke) said outright that this strike was caused by BA. I'm pretty jaded about the BBC, to say the least, and even that surprised me.

Read the BBC report I linked to at the start of my post and see how far down it you have to read before they let you know that it's not BA whose actions are being protested.

ITN's coverage, I have to say, was very good. They obviously decided that the "BA have no control over this situation" angle was newsworthy, so stuck it in the first couple of sentences of every broadcast.