Is this irony, or have you suddenly joined some nutty far-right "freedom is slavery" outfit, John?

In what way did they deserve to be sacked? Gate Gourmet is trying to cut their benefits and in some cases their wages (already not much higher than the minimum). Now it has started hiring agency staff on short term contracts, its goal not doubt being to get rid of the permanent staff. And you think this is a good idea and the permanenet staff deserve to be treated like this, and should be instantly dismissed if they try to do something about it? Because God forbid service types should have things like pensions and paid holidays and job security, eh?

but who weren’t even employed by the same company, is utterly pisstaking behaviour.

They were exmployed by the same company a few years ago, until BA decided to sell-off its catering division (which became Gate Gourmet). Thanks to the geography of Heathrow, many of the staff there are members of the same family, so many of BA’s support staff are related to Gate Gourmet’s workers.

As well as hiring some caterers who don’t come from the 1970s, BA needs to sack every single employee taking part in its unofficial ground staff strikes, and preferably replace them with hardworking immigrants being paid the minimum wage.

The fact that an awful lot of them are hard-working immigrants being paid minimum wage rather complicates this as a solution. Perhaps it could import people willing to work in exchange for not being beaten and chained?

In an ideal world, BA would be in a position to sack all the no-skill jokers currently being paid high wages to do fuck all in its non-engineering and non-flying operations, and replace them all with minimum wage contractors.

If they’re no-skill jokers doing fuck all, why replace them at all? Hell, if they’re really so superfluous and useless, how can it possibly be that this strike has caused so much disruption?

Unfortunately, the still-too-powerful unions make this impossible – so BA is likely to go bust at some point thanks to competition from airlines such as Ryanair and Easyjet (which do exactly this).

Would these be the unions that spent the past couple of days screaming "get back to work", allowing BA’s management to stay in hiding whilst they made the bosses’ case for them?

This post has to be irony. I know you’re not a lefty, John, but even you can’t be this stupid. This is the sort of brainless shite that only the hard right of the Tory Party is capable of spewing – in which case one imagines you’d be far too busy, reminiscing about the Raj and buggering young boys, to run a website.

Why not? Other industries pay crap wages and see how much the investors care. Some industries are good for capital and some for labour.

the more details that have come out this morning have made this post look even stupider than it did when it was written if that was possible

It’s just because Dan’s being too honest. You could say much the same about investment banking (substituting employees themselves for trades unions). But I’m sure you see that as a British success story.

The workers at GG are defending their livelihood, wages, their families and basic quality of lives, aswell as the dignity of work.

That, as a humanitarian, is the way I see it. I think we all understand the realities of capitalism, but in this instance, John B’s defence of it is wholly unconvincing.

He rather lets the cat out of the bag when he describes the GG strikers as "work-shy tossers", without backing up such a slanted view with at least some basic evidence that that is the real reason they are on strike.

You don’t have to be a raving lefty to see the basic errors in John B’s argument.

That said, I’ve never had decent customer service from British Airways aircrew, so I guess it isn’t a big surprise that these people didn’t either.

(I should say that in my view being stuck on some stinking aeroplane for eight hours is an extreme circumstance, though meeker readers of this site might disagree.)

That said, sitting on a plane for a few hours, mere meters away from the terminal, and I would probably contemplate opening the emergency hatch. Especially if you were there to egg me on. The caller to the BBC was very relaxed, in contrast: he even said he didn’t blame BA, as the pilot kept coming on the intercom every half hour to say that he still didn’t know anything…

What shite. Last time I checked, aeroplanes had doors and escape slides. If the crew of the ‘plane had wanted to let them out, they could have done; even if they hadn’t, the passengers could have opened the doors themselves. The notion that you need ground staff in order to leave an aeroplane is complete crap.