British Airways Cabin Crews Vote On Strike Action

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Discontent within the ranks of British Airways’ cabin crews has been brewing for a long time and it looks like things are about to come to a head. From Today, Wednesday 16 November, over 2,000 members of British Airways’ “Mixed Fleet” crew will start voting on whether or not to resort to industrial action to get their voices heard.

The voting period will close on 14 December and, should the result be a vote to go on strike, the union representing the BA crew members (Unite) will have to give British Airways 7 days notice before a strike can be called. This could potentially affect a lot of end-of-year holiday plans.

What Is British Airways’ Mixed Fleet?

Mixed Fleet is a segment of British Airways’ cabin crew pool, set up in 2010, in response to issues the airline was having in trying to cut costs under agreements with existing cabin crew.

As BA was having trouble getting existing workplace agreements renegotiated to their satisfaction they set up a completely new employee pool that they called Mixed Fleet.  All new cabin crew recruits from 2010 onwards are classified as members of Mixed Fleet and they work under significantly different (worse) work contracts than legacy BA crew members.

Mixed Fleet employees work a variety of short-haul and long-haul routes and are employed on the Airbus A320 family, Boeing 777-200s, Boeing 777-300s and Boeing 747-400s. I don’t believe they work the A380s but I’m prepared to be corrected on that.

Why Are BA’s Mixed Fleet Cabin Crew Voting On Strike Action?

Quite simply it’s because the working conditions Mixed Fleet crew members are living under aren’t what they signed up for.

Unite says that its members were promised pay levels of “10% above the market rate” while the reality is that basic annual pay starts at just £12,000 ($15,000) and average annual pay including allowances is just under £16,000 ($20,000).

The union adds that some of its members are working up to three jobs to help pay the bills and it claims that a recent survey revealed that two thirds of Mixed Fleet respondents admitted  to “going to work unfit to fly because they could not afford to be off sick“.

Unite regional officer Matt Smith is quoted as saying:

British Airways, once the ‘world’s favourite airline’ is fast becoming the ‘world’s least liked’, paying poverty wages while its parent company predicts annual earnings of £4.7 billion between this year and 2020.

The promise of salaries being between £21,000 and £25,000 for ‘Mixed Fleet’ cabin crew is a flight of fancy, with BA’s offer of a 2 per cent pay rise doing nothing to address pitiful pay levels which are causing dedicated crew real hardship.

It should be to the company’s eternal shame that they, the UK’s national carrier, are making billions while their cabin crew responsible for maintaining a safe environment are working while sick and without adequate rest.

Link to Unite statement

Thoughts

I’ve spoken to a lot of British Airways cabin crew members over the past year and if there’s one thing they’ve all had in common is that they’re tired of the “cuts, cuts, cuts” environment they find themselves working in.

Every single one of them (not an exaggeration) mentioned how they’d like customers to write in to British Airways to complain about the continuous cuts the airline has been introducing.

Cabin crew are being hit by cuts behind the scenes and then have to face the flying public who are increasingly up in arms about the cuts that we do actually see. We’ve seen British Airways cut everything from the flowers in First Class through to complimentary food on short-haul flights…..and it’s going to get worse.

We already have just 30″ of seat pitch in short-haul Business Class, the airline has already reduced the second meal on long haul flights to nothing more than a snack, elite status is barely recognised if you purchase a “hand baggage only” fare and now we’re told that BA will be squeezing in more seats to its aircraft to make us all even more uncomfortable.

Enough is enough.

British Airways is screwing over its employees and its customers at the same time.

I’d love the Mixed Fleet to go out on strike and, to give you an idea of just how hostile a lot of other frequent flyers are towards BA management, take a look at this thread on Flyertalk.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen that many comments from frequent BA flyers that support strike action against the airline.

These are the flyers who are most likely to be affected should industrial action take place….and they’re in favor of it! That’s just how bad things have become.

The feeling seems to be that British Airways won’t listen to its staff and it won’t listen to its customers so perhaps a strike that hits the airline where it hurts most – its bottom line – may be a good idea.

There is one piece of good news for the union leadership that will have to negotiate with British Airways hierarchy. Thanks to the recent IAG presentation to bondholders we now know what sort of language Willie Walsh and Alex “what else can I charge customers for” Cruz understand.

In fact there’s absolutely no need for the union representatives to do anything other than hand BA management their own slide:

Maybe that will finally get the message home.

To see which routes may be affected should a strike be called here’s a link to a Flyertalk thread listing out all the Mixed Fleet routes (check the Wiki at the top).