During Wednesday’s Prime Ministers Question Time, the opposition leader David Cameron stated he wants Unite Trade Union members to cross the picket lines and go to work and wanted Prime Minister Gordon Brown to make the same statement.
Around 90% of the Unite trade union members voted to go on strike if British Airways management didn’t offer a better deal. I don’t know enough about why British Airways employees feel it’s necessary to go on strike, so can’t comment on the rights and wrongs of the decision (not that it matters for my point).
Since going on strike is a legal option available to BA employees I don’t think a potential next Prime Minister (David Cameron) should be encouraging Unite trade union members to cross the picket lines during a legal strike, it sends the wrong message to the country!
David Cameron should have taken the same stance as Gordon Brown and encouraged the Trade Union Unite and BA management to work together to reach a resolution to avoid damaging strikes instead of picking sides, potentially making matters worse!
David
Unite held a ballot. 80% turn out, 80% support. I have never seen an air stewardess who I have suspected as a is a left wing rebel have you?
When ever the Tories have been in power they have always esculated industrial disputes and not done anything to resolve problems. David Cameron’s comments and those of his ‘top’ team regarding this dispute show they have not changed and cannot ever be trusted to run this country.
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You do realise that during their 13 years in power your beloved Labour have not repealed Maggie’s anti-trade union laws
Food for thought
The BA dispute is a civil matter between a company, shareholder bodies, and labour bodies. Just remember that if BA goes under smaller fish will soon move into the market and the employees will find new jobs. This is capitalism, it encourages competition and rewards the fittest in a free market. It is not for the government to step in any more than it would be appropriate for them to influence the way that I as a self-employed person engage with the free market. The government’s only role should be to see that the law is upheld. BA is not ‘too big to fail’, it should face the same constraints that everyone else faces – if it goes down then that is a risk the unions will have calculated including the potential for new jobs in the subsequent market.
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“This is capitalism, it encourages competition and rewards the fittest in a free market.”
I generally agree with your comment, I run my own business and the government has no place in telling us what we should do with our businesses.
That being said I see no issue with government acting as an arbiter to get the relevant bodies around a table talking as it’s better for the country for this dispute to be resolved preferably with compromises from both parties than have BA fail and thousands of British jobs lost.
Although this is true “Just remember that if BA goes under smaller fish will soon move into the market and the employees will find new jobs.” some of those smaller fish will be foreign airlines which means rather than British people gaining those jobs, it will be workers in another country and that isn’t good for Britain.
Woolworths was struggling before the credit crunch, they’d failed to change their business plan in the good years and in the bad years couldn’t survive! However tempting it must be for government to step in and bail out a company like Woolworths it should be avoided as it results in weak businesses. That’s the problem we had with many of the nationalised industries, government was always there to pick up the bill no matter what went wrong which is a terrible way to run a business: no responsibility to at least break even!
Not against nationalised industries per se, but there is a BIG tendency for them to be run poorly because they don’t HAVE to succeed. In a perfect world government would own a lot of businesses, (for example I’d rather profits from my savings in the bank goes to government than the bankers right now) but they’d be managed well with profit in mind, unfortunately in reality it doesn’t work that way. My business fails, we loose our house, savings etc… and my family doesn’t eat, a nationalised business fails, government throws more money at it to keep it afloat at any cost!
David
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