British Airways cabin crew and their bosses faced off Monday for a fresh day of industrial action, in a dispute that has fuelled an increasingly fierce row between the prime minister and his rivals.
Employees from the Unite union, which represents 12,000 BA cabin crew, entered the third day of their four-day strike, heaping fresh misery on thousands of weary passengers.
The airline and the union spent the weekend trading blows over the impact of the strike, which is the second bout of industrial action by the crews in a week over the carrier’s planned changes to pay and conditions.
BA claimed the number of cabin crew who had turned up for work Saturday was 63 percent, which they said was higher than during last week’s strike — but Unite disputed this claim and said more than half had joined the strike.
Just weeks before an election expected on May 6, opposition Conservative leader David Cameron used the strike to attack Prime Minister Gordon Brown, whose Labour party receives much of its funding from Unite.
Cameron told the BBC Sunday that Brown had displayed “weakness” in his response to the BA dispute and another planned strike by railway workers, saying this was “partly because he’s hocked to the unions”.
“The unions have scented weakness in the government and that’s one of the reasons why we?re seeing quite so many strikes,” he added.
Brown hit back in a separate BBC interview, saying there had been “far greater industrial peace” in the past 13 years of the Labour government than there had been in the previous 18 years of Conservative rule.
“We have been very tough about this British Airways strike, we’ve said its not in the public interest, it’s not in British Airways’ interest and we’ve said we don’t think it’s in the workers’ interest,” he said.
Talks between BA and Unite, Britain’s largest trade union, broke down on the eve of the first strikes on March 20 and there is no date for them to resume.
The strikes centre on what the union says is BA chief executive Willie Walsh’s “slash and burn strategy” to cut costs, which Unite claims would lead to a two-tier workforce and damage standards of customer service.
But Walsh has warned the loss-making airline could fold in a decade unless the changes he wants are carried out.
“We are trying to transform the way we operate because the industry is changing and the economic conditions have changed so radically that we’ve got to change,” he told the Daily Telegraph Saturday.
He added: “If we don’t do this, BA won’t exist in 10 years.”
Striking cabin crew set up picket lines outside Heathrow airport on Sunday, waving flags and banners and singing derogatory songs about Walsh, who the union has accused of bully tactics.
Heathrow’s Terminal 5, which operates only BA flights, was quiet Saturday and some passengers voiced anger at the walkout.
“I think the strikers are the ones in the wrong. I just think that in a recession they should be grateful for a job,” said 22-year-old Josh Philpotts, who nearly lost work because of a cancelled flight but managed to book another.
In an internal message to staff, Walsh said that on Saturday, the strike’s first day, 63 percent of crew scheduled to work had reported for duty, which was six percent more than last weekend’s walkout.
But Unite claimed 331 cabin crew had declared themselves on strike with a further 21 sick, which meant more than 50 percent of those rostered to work had joined the walkout.
