Expect some turbulence

Those charming BA stewards could be the miners of the Nineties

They are unlikely union militants. Many of them jet around the world, staying in expensive hotels, and earn more than pounds 30,000 a year. Yet they are promising to disrupt "the world's favourite airline" by going on strike for 72 hours this week, with the threat of further chaos to come - possibly in the shape of a consumer boycott.

The industrial action threatened by British Airline's ground staff and cabin crew is shaping up to be the most serious conflict at work since Wapping and the miners' strikes of the mid-1980s. Unless an eleventh-hour solution is found, the dispute is likely to ground many of BA's aircraft at the height of the holiday season, and thrust industrial relations law and practice back into the limelight just when the Government was hoping for a period of decent obscurity on the union front.

The row has already stirred ripples at Westminster, where 10 Labour MPs - not all of them "the usual suspects" - have signed an early day motion deploring "the tactics of industrial intimidation" being pursued by BA's chief executive Bob Ayling in the dispute as "the worst kind of macho management". The company has warned its 12,000 stewards and stewardesses they face dismissal if they strike, and they may be sued as individuals for the millions the airline will lose if the action goes ahead. They have been threatened with the withdrawal of promotion prospects and the loss of travel concessions until March 2000, and the withdrawal of early retirement or voluntary severance. These draconian measures, says BA, are "reasonable". A spokesman insists: "We are entirely justified in taking a reasonably hard line." Even Mr Ayling, a friend of Tony Blair, has admitted that "in a way what we are doing is unfair".

BA is making elaborate plans to break the strike and keep its planes in the air. Airline managers and other volunteers have been trained to do the jobs of ground staff and cabin crew, and there are plans to collect strike breakers secretly by coach. Staff who work normally will be paid up to pounds 75 in taxi fares per journey. The company also plans to video pickets. Even Rupert Murdoch didn't do that in his battle with the print unions, as far as we know.

How can this Eighties-style confrontation have come about? The airline announced last autumn that it must have a pounds 1bn cut in costs, despite posting pre-tax profits of more than pounds 600m. Talks opened with the unions - dominated by the Transport and General Workers' - and agreements were reached with 30,000 of the 58,000 staff, delivering savings of pounds 600m. But negotiating failed in two key areas: catering and the cabin. BA wants to sell off its loss-making long-haul catering arm and contract out the business. The TGWU says its national secretary for civil aviation, George Ryde, was informed of the sell-off by telephone while on a business trip to Brussels, rather than through the customary channels.

Most of the catering staff are drawn from the area surrounding Heathrow. Many are Asian, attracted as much by the concessionary flights to see their relatives on the Indian sub-continent as by the wages. They feared the loss of free and cheap fares if the service was contracted out, and voted to strike if the company went ahead. A compromise retaining the concessionary travel for five years, and after retirement for those with 10 years' service, was hammered out in talks last week, and is going out to a "consultative" ballot over the next few days. The response at a mass meeting was "quite hostile".

The second dispute is much more intractable. Cabin crew have a "bolshie" record of taking BA to the wire. Their pay is governed by a labyrinth of agreements which the airline wants to rationalise. Currently, crew receive only 40 per cent of their earnings as salary. The rest comes from allowances. Cabin crew get paid an allowance every time they step on a plane. Consolidation of some of these would increase the salary element to 54 per cent, which would be good for pensions. The TGWU's cabin section - BASSA, representing 8,700 of the 12,000 crew members - says the proposals would mean a cut in starting salary, a two-year pay freeze in place of 3 per cent increases already negotiated, and new rosters that would make them work an extra 28 days a year. The company admits it is seeking a cut in the cabin crew pay bill of pounds 42m a year. Negotiations went on for five months before breaking down. The airline says the union walked out of the talks.

Then it gets complicated. If the dispute were no more than a row over pay and conditions, it might be all over by now. But there is a breakaway union, recognised - encouraged, indeed - by BA, set up in 1989 when Bob Ayling was human resources director for the airline. A secretive committee of senior management was set up with the intention of encouraging the kind of split in the BA workforce that led to the breakaway Union of Democratic Mineworkers from Arthur Scargill's NUM after the ruinous 1984-85 pit strike. A confidential memo from the committee to Mr Ayling spoke of plans to reduce "the hold of trade union power over cabin crew members".

The outcome was Cabin Crew '89, which has around 3,000 members. When negotiations with BASSA broke down, the airline continued to negotiate with the breakaway union, and its members have voted 4-1 to accept BA's proposals. BA then imposed (it says "introduced") the changes on 8 May, and the incensed majority union ordered a strike ballot. Its members voted 73 per cent in favour of strike action, scheduled to begin on Wednesday. Now the TGWU is considering a new peace formula tabled by the airline in talks last week.

Mr Ayling is unmoved. He argues: "There is no rational reason for a dispute but, come what may, we have contingency measures to ensure that we continue to fly and put our customers' interests first. Our cabin crew have nothing to fear from this deal which is good for them - directly in terms of the increase to their basic pay and indirectly through the other benefits it will bring... Cabin crew salaries will not suffer adversely."

In a letter to all MPs, Bill Morris, general secretary of the TGWU, says: "Throughout both these disputes, our members have acted strictly in accordance with the requirements of the law with regard to balloting and giving notice of their intentions. British Airways, by contrast, has responded with all the finesse of US-style union-bashing management." Somewhat naively, the TGWU expresses astonishment at the resources BA has devoted to preparing for dispute rather than attempting to avoid one.

There must, at the very least, be a suspicion that BA is keen to emulate Ian MacGregor, the British Coal boss, and Rupert Murdoch: if not to break the union, then to divide and rule. BASSA's offices at Heathrow and Gatwick airport have been closed down. The airline says they would have been used only to mount a campaign of disruption. The MPs who have signed the early day motion note "the encouragement of scab union Cabin Crew '89" and believe the course of action adopted by the airline is "a fundamental attack on internationally recognised trade union rights". It must also be a consideration that an employer who takes a pre-emptive strike against the unions now will not have to conform with Labour's long-promised statutory right to recognition and collective bargaining likely to figure in the next Queen's Speech in 1998. Naturally, BA insists the company will work "with any union that shares our forward-thinking beliefs ... BASSA simply refuses to understand the need for change."

The dispute could get very nasty. The TUC has contingency plans for a nationwide consumer boycott of the kind it mounted against News International's titles in 1986. The airline is already suffering "strike blight" costing millions as travellers make alternative plans. Meanwhile, the Government looks on in dismay. The dispute is embarrassing for Tony Blair, a member of the TGWU, whose election campaign was supported by the union. His friendship with BA's chief executive is noted wryly among TGWU leaders. "Blair may prefer Ayling's company to that of Bill Morris," said one, "but our man is more entrenched in the Labour Party." The early day motion welcomes the election of a Labour government which "provides the opportunity to move on from the brutal industrial relations of the Thatcher years".

Unlikely martyrs they may be, but the bolshie "trolley dollies" of BA are raising the profile of rights at work in a concrete way, here and now, not just in the realm of a theoretical Labour focus group.