British Airways may see its first major strike in a decade as CEO Willie Walsh presses unions to accept almost 4,000 job cuts he says are necessary for the company to reduce costs and survive the recession, reports Bloomberg.
Walsh called in a government-paid mediator to facilitate talks with representatives of 22,000 cabin crew and ground staff after four weeks of direct negotiations produced no results. “There is every sign that a conflict is looming if this last throw of the dice does not succeed,” Mick Rix, the leader of the GMB union, said in a telephone interview with Bloomberg before the start of talks at the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service. “BA needs to seriously shift its stance in the negotiations.”
A strike would be the first major dispute at London-based British Airways since July 1997 when flight attendants walked out for three days in a protest that cost the airline at least 110 million pounds in earnings.
Howard Wheeldon, a senior strategist at BGC Partners in London, told Bloomberg he believes the airline and workers have too much at stake to risk a strike: “There has to be some form of compromise, because you can’t have an airline without cabin crew and the cabin crew need the jobs,” he said. “A strike would be very, very foolish and it would only make things much worse.”