BRENDAN Gold, Unite’s national secretary for civil air transport, said, after emerging from Monday’s BA Cabin crew rally in Kempton Park, that there would be a strike ballot for action by BA cabin crew in the run-up to Christmas.
However, this was not put to the mass meeting of 2,000 cabin crew.
The only motion that was put and carried was that BA cabin crew should consider paying a levy every week to the union to provide for the financial needs of those crew who now have to commute by air to work at their own expense.
It is strange that the members are asked to make this additional sacrifice when the Unite union has considerable wealth at its disposal, and could easily raise whatever is required with an appeal to its almost two million members.
It must be remembered that this is the union which has been able to give up to £12 million to the bankrupted Labour Party in the last year or so.
Gold, when he told the media that ‘We will inevitably have to take an industrial action ballot on these issues,’ did add a proviso. This was that the power to launch a ballot rested with Unite’s joint general secretaries, Tony Woodley and Derek Simpson.
In other words, Gold was speaking left, out of fear of the mounting anger and desire of the BA cabin crew for decisive action to win their struggle. He sought to give the impression that he was in favour of this move, while preventing a motion being put and carried at the meeting to organise such a strike ballot.
The real position of the Unite leaders is that they are continuing to sue for peace, and have declared that they will be seeking meetings with BA and Walsh in the wings of next week’s TUC congress to try and get Walsh to agree to some tiny ‘compromises’ that will allow them to call off the dispute and leave the sacked and victimised workers to their fate.
Those that protest that this will never happen, should study the Gate Gourmet experience.
Then Gold led a strike but quickly, together with Woodley and TUC general secretary Brendan Barber, organised a deal that accepted mass sackings and left the sacked and victimised workers to their fate, while they resumed the best of relations with the employer, who congratulated them on what they had done.
The Unite leaders know that Walsh has not the slightest intention of making a compromise settlement.
He intends to destroy trade unionism at BA, starting with the cabin crew, in order to create the ‘ideal platform’ for a successful merger with Iberia and then to engage in a spree to acquire new airlines, so as to be in a position to dictate new terms and conditions of service to the new workers thus ‘acquired’.
In fact, Walsh has made clear in his recent statements to the bourgeois media that his enemy at BA is not the Unite leadership but trade unionism.
He is on record as saying: ‘I don’t believe Unite wants to strike. I don’t believe Tony Woodley, Unite’s joint general secretary, wants to strike.
‘I’ve called Unite a dysfunctional trade union. It’s far from united. BASSA is out of touch and out of sync with the rest of the airline.’
In other words, he is signalling to Woodley and Gold that once BASSA has been dealt with, crushed or disbanded, normal service can be resumed to the mutual advantage of the employers and the trade union bureaucracy.
This is why BA cabin crew must demand an immediate strike ballot and a pledge from the leaders of Unite that Heathrow will be stopped. Leaders who refuse to do this must be made to resign.
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