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From Times Online
March 15, 2010

Gordon Brown - BA strike 'deplorable' and should be called off

Philip Pank Transport Correspondent

Gordon Brown today demanded that the Unite union call off its planned British Airways cabin crew strike, a dispute which the Prime Minister said was “unjustified” and “deplorable”.

The intervention puts Mr Brown on a collision course with one of his party’s biggest financial backers just weeks before a general election is expected to be called.

Later today, BA hopes to publish a revised schedule for the planned strike dates. Cabin crew members are due to walk out for three days on Saturday and for a further four days from March 27.

The loss-making airline expects to cancel one in three flights if the strike goes ahead as planned.

A strike jeopardises the travel plans of hundreds of thousands of passengers and would cost BA tens of millions of pounds in lost revenue.

“It is the wrong time, it is unjustified, it is deplorable, we shouldn’t have a strike,” Mr Brown told the BBC. “It is not in the company’s interest, it is not in the workers’ interest and it is certainly not in the national interest.

“I hope that this strike will be called off.” He said that he hoped a breakthrough could be achieved later today.

His comments followed a similar denunciation by Lord Adonis, the Transport Secretary, at the weekend.

He called on both sides to use the next few days to find a negotiated settlement to the “totally unjustified” strike.

Mr Brown spoke with the union’s joint general secretary, Tony Woodley, last week.

“Brown has been looking for conversations and briefings on both sides,” a union source said. “I do not think he was hassling us. He was good cop, I think Adonis was bad cop. [His] was a really unhelpful intervention, really badly briefed. There is a sense that the Prime Minister is much better briefed than his Minister.”

The union insists that BA thwarted hopes of peace when it withdrew a last-minute deal on Friday, after Unite named strike dates.

Derek Simpson, the joint leader of Unite, said that the talks could only resume if the deal was put back on the table. “The negotiations that Lord Adonis mentions we should get back to have been scuppered by management withdrawing their offer,” Mr Simpson said. Unless the deal, which the union had planned to put to a vote of its cabin crew members, was restored, “we have nothing to discuss”, he added.

Both sides say that they are still open for negotiations, but neither seems willing to back down over a fundamental cause of the dispute: the withdrawal of one cabin crew member from all BA flights in November. BA says it is vital in securing annual cost savings of £60 million from its cabin crew budget. The union says the changes imposed by BA must be repealed and savings made elsewhere. BA faces record losses this year and expects revenue to fall by as much as £1 billion.