British Airways Cabin Crew Strike
Abstract
The British Airways Cabin Crew Strike was a severe strike of the employees who work for the British Airways that took a total of seven days. The strike of the workers of the British Airways started on the day of March 20th the year 2010 to the 27th of march the same year but it was postponed to the 30th march of the same year after the please of the workers were not adhered to by the management of the of the airways. The strike was a drastic hint to the British Airways and was estimated to have cost a loss of almost twenty to thirty million Euros (20-30 million Euros) in a single day. This is a big loss to the aircraft company that made it to drastically drop in the list of the most competitive and competent airways since for the whole one week the people who are the customers of the company were unable to travel from one place to another thus caused inconvenience to the travels (Kaveri, 2009). The travelers had to look for another alternative to travel thus making the British Airways to incur a lot of losses.
British Airways Cabin Crew Strike
Introduction
The British Airways cabin crew strike disrupted the normal operation of the British Airways making the operating airplane service to incur a lot of losses to the company. This is because of the million of money that the company was unable to count for during the few days that the employees were unable to perform their own functions. The strike took place on the seven days starting from the 20th of March 2010 to the 30th of the same month. The company also had losses of more than thirty million Euros in the short period of time. The British Airways company cancelled one hundred and twenty three flights that had been scheduled to operate in the given days. The total number of the employees that were involved in the strike amounted to thirteen thousand five hundred employees. The key factor of the strike was later found out to be because of the low amount of incomes that the employees were being paid for their total end month earnings (Steven & Howard, 2009).
In little over a quarter of a Century, British Airways has gone from the most respected of global British Airways l Airlines to one of the most derided. Plagued by years of inefficient labor handling, an inability to plan forward for changes in fuel prices, an inflexible labor force and union strength, an ageing fleet, and a fall in British Airways l demand, their stock has fallen to such an extent that no day seems to pass without some tale of woe for the beleaguered airline hitting the press. Whilst strikes in the airline industry are not an infrequent phenomenon – Lufthansa has already in 2010 managed to avert one major labor strike – the regularity with which industrial action seems to afflict the firm, coupled with its failures in other areas has converted the airline into the laughing stock of the industry, and a once proud symbol of national prowess has recently had to snuggle up to Iberia in order to secure its financial future.
Literature Review
Interestingly however, this phenomenon of losing money through strike activity is not an isolated one. Strike activity has been on the increase throughout the world for a number of years now. Julia asks if there is ‘statistical foundation for the belief that industrial conflict has been tending to increase in recent years.’ Statistically, this seems to be the case. For example, in Poland, the Polish Central Statistical Office noted 12,800 strikes in the last three quarters of 2008. These strikes involved more than 208,000 employees or almost half of the workforce of the entities concerned. This marks a substantial increase in comparison with the same period in 2007, even though that was also a record-setting year with 1,700 strikes involving about 36,000 workers (Julia, 2010). Compared with 2007, the strikes observed in 2008 were significantly shorter in duration. GUS indicates that the average strike lasted only a few hours; in 2007, the average strike was over 20 hours in duration. Employees in the economic sectors of education, healthcare and transport most frequently resorted to industrial action, followed by workers producing special application machines, finished metal products and foodstuffs (Julia, 2010).
What have other people said about this problem
However, on closer inspection, the increase in strike action is perhaps not as isolated a phenomenon as one might think. One article from 1997 noted that “Industrial unrest last year was the worst for many years and employers fear it will continue to raise, the latest Industrial Relations Survey from law firm Dibb Lupton Alsop, shows today. The survey, which has accurately predicted trends in UK industrial relations for the past five years, shows that Dibb Lupton Alsop was only too right last year when it forecast: “We are possibly looking towards the worst ‘winter of discontent’ for many years”. The trend is also reflected in the latest figures from the Office of National Statistics, which show that the number of days lost due to industrial action last year more than trebled, from 415,000 to 1.3 million (Nicola, 2010).
Entitled ‘new labor, new partnership?’ the Dibb Lupton Alsop survey found there was a marked increase in both industrial tension and industrial action, with 42% of unionized employers experiencing industrial unrest over the past 12 months. Since 1994, this figure has steadily increased from 22%. The proportion of unionized employers who experienced actual stoppages increased from 5.5% in 1996 to 7.0% in 1997, the survey shows (Wilson, 2007). It also reveals that the South of England suffered more unrest than the North last year, and that the service sector was hit more than manufacturing, reversing the trends of recent years. But despite the continued rise in stoppages, the co-authors of the survey, David Bradley and Paul Nicholls, who are partners and specialists in employment law at Dibb Lupton Alsop, suggest that the next 12 months could see industrial unrest reaching “a high water mark” and they see a glimmer of hope for the future. The only independent survey of its kind published in Britain, the Dibb Lupton Alsop Industrial Relations Survey is the most authoritative, and it provides a benchmark against which industrial relations can be measured (Goodman, 1997).
What do you think of these views?
As mentioned earlier, British Airways is not alone in Racing strike activity and Lufthansa narrowly avoided industrial action earlier this year. In both of the cases outlined above, employee disenchantment over pay, working conditions, and general discontentment has contributed to ill-feeling which has nearly, if not fully, split over into industrial action. Nonetheless, in the case of Lufthansa, this 2008 industrial action plan was not isolated. At the start of 2009, the staff once again chose to go on strike, only British Airways cking down when their pay demands were met (Holman, 1997). A Reuters article at the time pointed out “Airlines are reeling from the aviation industry’s worst year ever, in which demand dropped faster than capacity could be cut, but workers are becoming increasingly impatient with pressure from employers to tighten their belts. Lufthansa aims to cut 1 billion Euros ($1.36 billion) of costs by 2011, to become leaner while expanding abroad. Europe’s national flag carriers have been trying to cut their costs as they lose market share to low-cost airlines such as Ryanair and EasyJet whose no-frills offers lure customers looking to cut their travel spending. British Airways wants three-quarters of its crew to accept a pay freeze this year, along with other cost-cutting measures. British Airways cabin crew voted in favor of a strike to protest the cost cuts. This is their second attempt at industrial action after a court forced the workers to a British Airways on plans for a twelve day strike over Christmas that would have affected a million travelers.
How do you evaluate them?
How best for British Airways to continue? As pointed out earlier, British Airways recently announced that they aim to partner up with Iberia, sharing routes. Whilst British Airways are strong in Asia and the US, Iberia is strong on Latin American routes, and shareholders of both firms have announced their support for the move. So to (amazingly) have many of the unions involved in negotiations as long as no job positions are threatened. Whilst this may be good news for the beleaguered carrier, it does not necessarily spell the end of its troubles. Whilst Willie Walsh has one of the toughest jobs in the UK and is often derided by unions and staff, his aims, namely to secure greater competitive advantage for British Airways by cost-cutting and cranking down on inefficiencies, is not without merit. The disastrous opening of Terminal 5 seems to have set the airline British Airways ck, but with the Iberia move, coupled from more understanding from British Airways’s staff, and a more clear-sighted and future British Airways used fuel purchasing policy, British Airways could make the drastic cuts needed to secure their financial future.
Hypothesis
The major solution that the British Airways can undertake so as to solve the problem that might arise the future strikes that involves the employees and the workers who operate the aircraft and serve the travelers in the plain is by setting a major meeting that both the management and the other employees will be able to agree on the terms and the payment that each one of them will be receiving at the end of each end month. This is very vital since it will ensure that both the management and the workers are very comfortable with the agreement that will be achieved at the meeting. Another possible solution is by the management employing new recruits of workers who will be able to perform better services but after only they have agreed on the terms of the payments and the upkeep of the entire month. The major efforts that the British Airways should reinforce is the various strategies that the management will be able to enact to make sure that
Rationale
Strike action as a whole is best understood as a subsection of employee action to achieve their demands and rights. They discuss the relative merits of collectivist and individualist management styles on the level of strategic integration, and find a positive relationship between the two (Wilson, 2007). More importantly however, they find that high levels of strategic investigation result in low levels of collectivism amongst employees, a reading that although acquiescing to employee strength, largely fall in favor of the employers predicament. Nonetheless, they are not averse to providing evidence that comes down in support of employers working harder to optimize levels of communication between the two agents. Ultimately, they conclude that “ownership was the most significant factor impacting upon variations in levels of strategic integration.’
The airline’s pilots and engineers have already accepted austerity measures; cabin staff, notified of the proposed changes in July, are less inclined to compromise (though some have taken voluntary redundancy). On December 14th Unite, the union which represents almost all of the company’s 13,500 cabin staff, said they had voted overwhelmingly to strike.’
However, it goes on to add that ‘Industrial disputes are not the only issue bothering British Airways. More than 20 years after privatization, it is still struggling with the legacy of state ownership. Grandfathered work practices allow cabin crew to spend two nights at a destination if the itinerary has been disrupted, which plays havoc when planes are redirected because of British Airways d weather. According to the Civil Aviation Authority, it costs British Airways an average of £29,900 ($49,000) in British Airways sic pay to employ a cabin attendant, compared with £20,200 for EasyJet, the next-best payer among British airlines (Steve & Rod, 2007). British Airways staff work a maximum of 900 hours a year in the air, far fewer than European Union guidelines allow, and most can expect generous pensions.’
In the case of both British Airways and Lufthansa, it seems clear that their workforce has quickly moved into a collective mindset. As a Financial Times article noted of the beleaguered carrier, Cockpit, the airline’s union for pilots, Cockpit said its main goal was to secure jobs in Germany, which it argued were being threatened by Lufthansa’s increasing reliance on recently bought foreign subsidiaries such as Austrian Airlines or British Midland. It was prepared to help Lufthansa in cutting costs to counter the downturn, including if needed a “pay freeze,” but accused Lufthansa of not submitting an offer for negotiation Ilona Ritter, a Cockpit official, said the four-day strike – which will also affect Lufthansa Cargo and Germanwings, its low-cost carrier was justified after months of fruitless talks but “Lufthansa could end this very quickly if they come to us”. Cockpit said strike action had been supported by about 94 per cent of those who had taken part in a British Airways riot.”
Conclusion
Although the strike of the employees might have affected the British Airways in the sense that it interrupted the normal operation of the company, the surrounding people and even those that are found all over the world were affected by the strike since they were unable to move from one place to another because of the lack of appropriate transport of the planes. This is to imply that in the future the management of the British Airways should try it is best to make sure that both the management and the workers are comfortable with the payments at the end of the year thus able to perform better in their workplaces and give hundred percent in their work (Brawnwell, 2010).
References
Kaveri, N. (2009). British Airways Plays Down Threat of Cabin Crew Strike. Wall Street Journal – Eastern Edition, 11/3/2009, Vol. 254 Issue 106
Steven, R., & Howard, M. (2009). British Airways Averts Strike. BusinessWeek.com, 12/21/2009, p27-27
Julia, W. (2010). British Airways Cancels 1,100 Flights Amid Strike. New York Times, 3/21/2010, p4
Julia, W. (2010). British Airways Is Training Employees as Fill-Ins if Attendants Strike. New York Times, 1/26/2010, p8
Nicola, C. (2010). British Airways Cabin Crews Are Set to Resume Walkout. New York Times, 3/27/2010
Goodman, A. (1997). British Airways was still. Aviation Week & Space Technology, 07/21/97, Vol. 147 Issue 3, p18, 2p
Holman, R. (1997). British Airways strife eases. Wall Street Journal – Eastern Edition, 07/15/97, Vol. 230 Issue 10
Kaveri, N. (2010). Cabin-Crew Strikes Hurt BRITISH AIRWAYS Traffic. Wall Street Journal – Eastern Edition, 4/8/2010, Vol. 255 Issue 81, pB6, 0p, 1 Black and White Photograph
Brawnwell, J. (2010). Cabin crew strikes ‘marring BRITISH AIRWAYS ‘s recruitment potential.’ Marketing Week (01419285), 5/27/2010, Vol. 33 Issue 22, p5-5, 1/2p
Steve, G., & Rod, S. (2007). British Airways Averts Strikes With Union Deal. Wall Street Journal – Eastern Edition, 1/30/2007, Vol. 249 Issue 24, pA2, 0p
Wilson, M. (2007). British Airways Flight Attendants Plan Strikes After Talks Fail. Wall Street Journal – Eastern Edition, 1/22/2007, Vol. 249 Issue 17, pA10,
