British Airways are undeniably an incompetent company. If I ran an airline and my contract caterers went on strike then I’d call up Pret a Manger or M&S and order 100,000 sandwiches, rather than leave long-haul passengers hungry and angry. And then cancel the caterers’ contract and sue them for my expenses…
Even so, British Airways’s employees appear to be marginally worse than their management. Going out on strike on behalf of work-shy tossers who not only thorougly deserved to be sacked [*], but who weren’t even employed by the same company, is utterly pisstaking behaviour. 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.
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. 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).
It’s called (sort of) [**] capitalism. It works. Eventually…
[*] The contract caterers, Gate Gourmet, appear to be almost as incompetent as BA. Not being able to tell the difference between the people who’ve been on a walkout and people who’ve been on sick leave suggests the dodgiest HR policies known to mankind. This is yet more reason for BA to cancel their contract and hire someone less useless.
[**] As Jim points out below, the aviation industry is far from a good example of capitalism in action. The point is that firms run by incompetent idiots where workers hate the managers and vice versa tend to lose out, while firms with semi-competent management and less adversarial labour relations tend to do better.
This is a disgusting post. Fucking loser.
Defending capitalism using Ryanair as your template?
What balls!
People who take unballoted strike action are in breach of their employment contracts, and therefore their employers should be able to dismiss them if they wish. What else is there to say?
GG and BA are both clearly inept firms. But if a company’s losing £30 million a year (as GG UK is), it’s pretty fucking obvious that costs need to be cut – and if the relevant company’s main cost is labour, then what else can they do other than lay people off and cut wages? I guess closure is another option, but I don’t see this making life better for the GG employees…
Jim – while the airline industry is not exactly a hotbed of capitalism thanks to giant subsidies all round (directly to flag carriers, directly to people like Ryanair for flying to remote places, and indirectly to everyone through the shameful refusal to tax aviation fuel), it’s hard to claim that the gains made by budget carriers at the expense of traditional airlines aren’t because the former are managed more competently and provide the public with a better-value service…
Here’s what else there is to say: if your priority is profits rather than people, of course you’re not going to give a fuck about people losing their jobs, even if sick, and ending up broke as fuck. Of course you’re going to want everyone who is "unskilled" to be on miserly wages.
However, calling a group of low-paid workers who’ve just been fired, and who are demanding their jobs back "work-shy tossers", and also describe those who risk their own jobs and pay to support them as "pisstaking", requires special labial commitment to the bosses’ arseholes.
Never again can I take you seriously when you take the piss out of the Daily Mail after that inhuman, utterly stupid post.
Incidentally, a number of those being fired are "hardworking immigrants" – I suppose they don’t count unless they’re on the minimum wage. You dozy bastard.
But if a company -can’t- make enough money to pay the amount of workers it currently has the amount they’re currently being paid, what do you suggest should happen? What options are there other than closing down or cutting wages?
The ones who were fired while on sick leave, the company says it fired by mistake. It’s possible they’re lying, in which case they’re truly despicable bastards, or it’s possible they genuinely fucked up, in which case they’re truly incompetent bastards. Their general labour relations situation could equally well imply either. I hold no brief or affection for GG, and hope that its useless bosses also find themselves in the dole queue (one of the things I most dislike about capitalism is the way that inept managers -don’t- get fired nearly often enough).
Re ‘pisstaking’ – striking in support of people who work for a different company than you do is just silly, no matter how well-intentioned. It’s like, oh, I don’t know, invading a country because some similarly-coloured people from a different country blew up some buildings.
("they’re" in the second sentence of the second paragraph refers to Gate Gourmet not the sick workers, obviously)
More generally, why should someone preparing food for an airline get better pay than someone preparing food for a restaurant? Sure, you might want to claim that they should *both* be paid more – so why devote resources towards lobbying for special privileges for a small minority, instead of devoting them towards ensuring that employers meet basic wage, health and safety standards in the general foodservice sector?
GG employees, even after the planned cuts, would be paid a living wage and wouldn’t be at risk of losing their hands in the machinery. Many people in foodservice are not. The latter group seem more deserving of The Left’s campaigning resources than the former.
GG employees, even after the planned cuts, would be paid a living wage and wouldn’t be at risk of losing their hands in the machinery
Except the ones that have been laid off, naturally. They’ll be on the dole and maybe default on their mortgage. I’m not suggesting that it’s GG’s job to worry about that… just taking issue with the rather cavalier nature of the statement you made.
Incidentally, one of the cost-cutting measures taken by Ryanair was to insist that disabled passengers either pay extra or fuck off. Capitalism in action.
Well done for figuring out the basics, John. A company’s job is to make profits for its shareholders. Sure. Yeah. I understand that. What I don’t do is valorise it. That company is owned by a man with a $6bn fortuen, who hired the Rolling Stones to play at his birthday party. This isn’t a poor little cash-strapped company. This is a poorly performing company, and the workers are under no moral obligation to accept the cost of that.
why should someone preparing food for an airline get better pay than someone preparing food for a restaurant?
Ah, the old ‘greediness’ card. If restaurant workers were better unionised, they’d be able to get more pay. There’s no reason for any group of workers to accept low pay, particularly if its to help put more money in the hands of shareholders or cover for management incompetence.
Funny how you don’t ask yourself why one man should have $6bn. I assume the reason is because market allocations must always be just. Which is why stockbrokers (who do no useful work) get more than nurses, and shareholders (who do no work at all) get free money.
striking in support of people who work for a different company than you do is just silly, no matter how well-intentioned. It’s like, oh, I don’t know, invading a country because some similarly-coloured people from a different country blew up some buildings.
No, it’s fuck all like that. Striking in solidarity with some people who are being fucked over is courageous. Bombing another country for having the wrong-coloured skin is racist. You’d have to be an absolute pillock to make such a connection.
I’m a bit lost with some of this.
"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. 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"
Is it really a good idea to have ground staff of an airline being merely anyone they can get who’ll accept a minimum wage job? Do we really want the minimum wage to become not the minimum wage but the normal wage for unskilled people (if the BA ground staff are ‘unskilled’, which surely is not true?). What signals does it give off to your staff if you are paying the very minimum guaranteed by Law?
"But if a company -can’t- make enough money to pay the amount of workers it currently has the amount they’re currently being paid, what do you suggest should happen? What options are there other than closing down or cutting wages?"
Surely the other option is to increase productivity, which is usually helped by competent and decent management. This is also why minimum wages always have less impact on employment that people think – it actually makes firms work out how to increase productivity rather that merely cutting costs. It doesn’t seem implausible that this could be done in this case, and maybe BA should share some responsibilty for the price they pay.
What signals does it give off to your staff if you are paying the very minimum guaranteed by Law?
A problem addressed by that noted management consultant Chris Rock:
"You know what it means when they pay you the minimum wage? You know what they’re trying to tell you? It’s like ‘Hey, if I could pay you less, I would … but it’s against the law!’ "
My sister was due to fly Ryanair from Spain last night, but they simply announced, "this flight is now closed" to the people who’d been queueing at the desk for the previous hour, refused to check people on, the staff refused to give explanations or their names (required for the Spanish complaints form) etc etc. Not my favourite example of a great company on this particular day.
Fucking hell, if I wanted to read the Daily Mail, I’d shoot myself.
…why should someone preparing food for an airline get better pay than someone preparing food for a restaurant?
Why should some jumped-up accountant be sitting on $6bn when one of his companies is sacking 800 workers?
Chris, I was travelling by Ryanair a few years ago. After we’d checked-in and gone through to the Boarding Gate at Stansted we were informed that the flight was delayed. That was the last we heard for 8 (that’s EIGHT) hours, at which point we were told (by a representative from another airline) that the flight had actually been cancelled a couple of hours previously, at which point all Ryanair staff had gone home for the night without informing any of their passengers who were sat in a departure lounge.
Myself and my girlfriend at the time then spent another two and a half hours trying to retrieve our luggage, paid for a cab back to London (by this point the trains had stopped running) and flew out by Aer Lingus the following day. Ryanair offered no apology and no compensation.
That experience was compounded a few weeks later when a disabled friend of mine was told that he would have to pay for a wheelchair to take him onto a Ryanair plane. He – in my view rightly – was more than a little pissed off that the company expected him to pay more for his trip than someone with full use of their legs. He refused to pay, missed his flight, and now – like myself – will gladly lambast that piece of shit masquerading as an airline at every opportunity (and don’t even get me started on the Churchill advert post-July 7th!)
…and never mind "not being left-wing", I reckon you might be to the right of The Sun over this:
CATERING workers whose sackings led to the cancellation of all British Airways flights from Heathrow today expressed amazement their plight had caused such chaos.
Gate Gourmet staff who lost their jobs on Wednesday in a row over working practices said they felt sorry for holidaymakers stranded at the airport, but there was nothing they could do, and vowed to continue their fight.
Talks between the Transport and General Workers’ Union and the firm, which supplies BA with onboard catering, broke down last night, with Gate refusing to reinstate almost 800 workers who were dismissed.
Tens of thousands of air passengers are facing another day of chaos, with all BA flights to and from Heathrow cancelled until at least 6pm today, after BA baggage handlers and other workers began an unofficial strike yesterday in solidarity with the catering workers.
As crowds of workers gathered outside the community centre, many carrying placards and chanting "We want justice", they told of their shock at their sacking and gratitude for the support from BA staff.
Adiwall Sotish, 37, a driver for the company, said: "What’s happening shows unity amongst the workers because if Gate Gourmet can do this then BA or any other company can do it."
Seems Adiwall Sotish has grasped the rationality of sympathy strikes, even if you can’t.
Firstly, the thing that *really* pissed me off about this case was summed up by someone on his mobile phone from an aircraft last night on the news. He’d been stuck on the plane, which had arrvied at Heathrow some hours ago, and they weren’t been let off because none of the ground-staff would help them. That seems completely wrong: sure, go on strike and stop people *leaving* Heathrow: they can be put up in a hotel by BA, or go home or something. But what’s with leaving a few hundred people on a plane for hours? Surely help them get off and to a hotel (at BA’s expense); it might, you know, win you some support from the public?
Right, to John’s post. To my mind, this sums up a disconnect between how capitalism *should be* and how *it is*. In an ideal world, yes, GG would be a failed company because it’s incompetant. Yes, the workers would find themselves without a job, but they can always find another one, presumably with a better company that is now doing GG’s work competantly. The senior management would suffer for their incompetance. In this ideal world, it would be reasonable to sack people, and reasonable for BA to be very, very annoyed with people going on strike in support.
Sadly, as people have pointed out in this thread, it’s not an ideal world. BA haven’t terminated their contract. There’s no indication that the senior management of GG, who are incompetant, will suffer any consequences at all. Instead, it’s the workers who suffer, and seemingly things won’t actually get any better. I can’t help but have some sympathy here.
Also, as Chris points out, Easyjet et al. are tossers. I rarely fly with them anymore: BA are often just as cheap (esp. if you don’t book 6 months in advance) and offer much, much better customer service. Another failing of capitalism: people look just at the cost, and then complain about the service when it invariably bites them in the arse. Well, in some sense, it serves them right; in another sense, we really should value customer service more than we do.
This is just crazy. Workers need protection against arrogant and callous bosses. These workers had jobs that made the company money for a number of years and worked hard. Now an American buyout house, which only put in c.30% of the purchase price in cash, wants to keep the company afloat to make a 30% year on year profit (minimum) and everyone here calls for companies to be able to sack workers whenever????????????
I agree the management have been incomeptent. That probably means they have made a number of incompetent
decisions over the years, and all you lot want to do is punish the workers and give the management a get out of jail free card by letting them sack them and bring in lower paid workers…
No way… its in everyones interest to ensure the company makes money if management can’t sack the workers
everyone here calls for companies to be able to sack workers whenever????????????
As far as I can tell, Jezza, most people here are arguing against john’s laissez-faire view of industrial relations.
Oh dear a son of the Thatcher years and "secondary pickets".
The correct answer to the question "why should anyone be paid massively over the odds for doing this job?" is always "well why shouldn’t they?".
As far as I can see it, the main reason why the airline industry has been such a great place to work and such a dreadful place to invest money ever since Kitty Hawk is that it’s got a militant workforce who all know that if they go out on strike in support of one another, the bosses will crumble because it’s so fantastically expensive to keep planes on the ground. Nice work if you can get it is what I say. (indeed, I said, last time everyone was getting worked up about overpaid workers)
Chaps – airline indsutry workers aren’t particularly well paid, either in the low-cost or full-service sectors (trust me – I worked in the latter for years). Seven years ago BA sold off its catering branch (the comparison is to a food-processing factory, not a restaurant kitchen)to GG – in the process BA workers were given certain guarantees on T&Cs being maintained by their new owners, whoops, employers. It would be instructive to know whether any of those T&Cs were at stake in the GG dispute. Whether or not, GG’s new management could usefully be encouraged to pack their stetsons & f*** off back to Texas. But BA are, ultimately, in a mess of their own making here. Outsourcing catering was not a good idea – unless you happened to be an accountant eager to impress Bob Ayling.
I don’t like the callousness of this post at all. Such a quality certainly isn’t what I would define as "not left wing".
Nonetheless, you are to be commended for confessing to the link between mass immigration and low wages for unskilled workers. People far more senior than yourself have written pieces derisory in their ignorance talking about how there would be no service or cleaners in London without mass immigration. Of course, this is nonsense – what we’d have are cleaners and others in kitchen staff type jobs paid rather better, because the supply of unskilled labour is so much lower. The so-called economic argument for mass immigration is really an argument that middle class people shouldn’t ever have to pay more for their cups of coffee on a morning – any rise in the market wage should be met with enough immigration to bring it back down. That perhaps is the benefit of your callousness: you can admit you want a permanently low-paid underclass to serve you as you go about your daily life – and yes, in words you would use, one invariably of a different skin colour than your own.
those catering workers are not paid huge wages… the airline industry has been a terrible place for investors, but management has constantly over invested and investors have supplied that capital… moral hazard… you just can’t expect people to give up these conditions… why are none of the other catering companies doing it? this work can’t be outsourced overseas?
this is just poor management… why allow it to be rewarded with a massive human cost
that stuff about the workforce militancy being correlated to airline (un)profitability is crap… what’s your data on that? most analysts believe it is due to the cyclality of the industry which requires massive capital investment to build a network that can cover peak times but with a specified asset base that caanot be reduced greatly in poor times… but please show me your data on workforce militancy … I’m all ears
As far as I can see it, the main reason why the airline industry has been such a great place to work and such a dreadful place to invest money ever since Kitty Hawk is that it’s got a militant workforce who all know that if they go out on strike in support of one another, the bosses will crumble because it’s so fantastically expensive to keep planes on the ground. Nice work if you can get it is what I say.
So a thriving industry produces a dreadful return to investors because of the militancy of its trade unions and you seriously mean this as a defence of airline employees?
Another failing of capitalism: people look just at the cost, and then complain about the service when it invariably bites them in the arse.
Which is nicely reminiscent of the way in which BA outsourced catering to the cheapest supplier. Cheap does not neccesarily equal value for money. If our largest corporations haven’t learnt this lesson what hope is there for the rest of us?
Meanwhile, we can assume that BA work closely with their suppliers (in this case GG) in order to benefit both businesses. Why should the employees of each organisation not also work closely together in furtherance of their own interests? Some people might call it illegal industrial action. I prefer to term it ‘synergy’.
"you seriously mean this as a defence of airline employees"
Yes. The investors continue to invest, do they not?
Sounds like the politics of envy to me, Peter.
the people here who blame the workers know nothing about economics or running a business… they represent the best British management has ever had to offer the world: blame the worker and ignore the incompetent boss… which is why Britain has so few world class companies… and the few it does have are hardly ever run by a Brit
The Office didn’t come from nowhere
He’d been stuck on the plane, which had arrvied at Heathrow some hours ago, and they weren’t been let off because none of the ground-staff would help them.
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.
Chris, Well, okay, in extreme circumstances, sure. But I think BA might have been a touch annoyed if they’d set off the emergency systems.
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…
Yeah, see, that strikes me as pretty talentless. I’d imagine that many of the people on that plane had better things to do than sit around on the tarmac for eight hours, and if the crew were doing their jobs they’d have taken some steps to get them out of the ‘plane.
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.)
Unfortuanate use of languange by John B.
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.
"So a thriving industry produces a dreadful return to investors because of the militancy of its trade unions and you seriously mean this as a defence of airline employees? "
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.
except that there isn’t one decent British investment bank left… the largest one left is Rothsvhilds… and it doesn’t even have a bond division…
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
So a thriving industry produces a dreadful return to investors because of the militancy of its trade unions and you seriously mean this as a defence of airline employees?
Why not? Other industries pay crap wages and see how much the investors care. Some industries are good for capital and some for labour.
Even so, British Airways’s employees appear to be marginally worse than their management. Going out on strike on behalf of work-shy tossers who not only thorougly deserved to be sacked [*],
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.
Eugh, all this case tells me is that the UK’s union legislation stinks and needs reforming. The ban on secondary picketing is ludicrous from the point of view of any unionist: if you care about labour relations or workers then you don’t cross a picket line. You don’t cross one to go to work, or to go to uni classes, or to go shopping. You just don’t.
Personally, I think its really decent of the BA guys to stop work even though it may not have been motivated by general purpose solidarity. Speaking as someone who has been on strike and on a picket line (in midwinter) it isn’t any fun and it’s generally best for all concerned to get things sorted out quickly, which usually means giving the employer’s profits and reputation a beating until they’re prepared to make some concessions. Anyone who thinks unions in the UK today have too much power needs their head looking at.
I think you’ve just lost all your friends, John. This is why I’m only blogging about cricket these days.