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Breaking: British Airways Cabin Crew Vote To Strike. Again.

February 22, 2010 at 2:21 PM | by | Comments (0)

Having been denied their strike by a judge at the end of last year, British Airways cabin crew are ready to make another go of it. The official announcement came down a little over an hour ago from the Unite union, which is Britain's largest and which counts much of the airlines' staff among its members. Out of the 12,000 ballots that were cast, 7,000 employees - an astounding and apparently very pissed off 81% - voting in favor of the strike.

What happens next: no strike date has been announced so BA flights continue as normal. There's another meeting set for Thursday, which is when the union will roll out a list of potential options. They've already ruled out striking around schools' Easter break. They got burned the last time they tried to leverage holiday traffic as part of their strategy, so presumably they're loathe to play with fire again.

Any final decision has to be handed to the airline a week before employees walk out, which will give BA time to install the replacement cabin crews they've been training. Those crews include pilots, so if they've got enough substitutes they might be able to hunker down for a while.

Under normal circumstances you could expect the British public to frown on a giant corporation unflinchingly breaking a strike like that. Unite and its members, though, are facing a not insignificant optics problem. In a time when airlines are tightening their belts in the face of massive losses, BA cabin crews are paid roughly twice as much as their nearest counterparts. One way this ends is with a whole new fleet of younger, more flexible employees willing to accept less compensation.

Or as the union will inevitably put it, a whole new fleet of inexperienced, less competent employees with no commitment to the airline or its customers.

[Photo: Adambro / Wiki Commons]

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