Why there is Bugger All solidarity for BA strikers
Those assuming – or hoping – that there will be an upsurge in ‘crippling’ mass strike action in response to the coming cuts in public spending, a re-run of the 1978-9 ‘Winter of Discontent’, might think again after looking at what has happened at BA. Whatever the nostalgia-filled TV schedules might suggest, this is not the 1970s or 1980s, the political and industrial context is very different and, despite the weakness of management, it is far more problematic for any group of employees to mount effective resistance to cuts.
In this sense, the BA dispute provides a snapshot of the problems other under-pressure workers are likely to face in fighting back over jobs and pay and working conditions – and the scope that the useless authorities might have for getting away with it.
On one hand, the strikes by the traditionally un-militant BA cabin crew, often caricatured as trolley dollies, show the depth of bitterness among many working people at their treatment by employers in the recession, where they feel they are being forced to pay for a crisis that is not of their making. Staff like the BA cabin crew do not take industrial action lightly. It was only last summer, we might recall, that some BA workers begrudgingly responded to a management request to work for free for a month as an alternative to job cuts. That such moderate people have now been prepared to go out on a limb and strike shows the potential for resistance when people are pushed too far.
