God REALLY doesn't like union busters

[fpb]

An enormous volcanic explosion has shut down the whole airspace over Britain and Ireland. Every air company in the world is going to lose money. But British Airways, unlike most other companies, have just wasted millions upon millions of pounds on a savage union-busting campaign disguised as a strike. And now they will find themselves further millions out of pocket, worse than most because they are based in Britain. As I said on another occasion: payback may be a bitch, but she tastes sweet as honey.

Comments

[shezan.livejournal.com]

union-busting campaign disguised as a strike

Okay, haven't been following closely enough, could you explain further?.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Basically, BA has a tradition of macho management that has never done it any good but that they seem unwilling to ditch. The latest manifestation was the attempt to cut the wages of their personnel by up to 40%, which inevitably resulted in a strike. Using union-busting Thatcher-age legislation, BA found a judicial hit-man who decided that because a few people who had voted in the ballot were no longer working for BA, the ballot was invalid (a stunt that is designed to make any ballot invalid). Willie Walsh repeatedly shifted his ground in negotiation, broke agreements already reached, and did everything in his power to embitter the situation, which was still hanging fire when the volcano exploded this morning. BA may now come close to bankruptcy, but the macho filth that lead the company would deserve it. And as they already intended to ruin, and probably replace, their workforce, I can't even say that if BA went down it would be bad for its employees.

I hate macho management and union-busting. One of the things that first showed me that Blair was rotten to the core was that, once elected, he did nothing to roll back the Thatcher-age anti-union legislation. I don't say abolish it, becaue any reasonable person would accept that British unions in the seventies had gone quite mad and needed being forced into reason; but to leave union members exposed to the sort of treatment Walsh and co. are handing out to them means to stab your constituents in the back just to please Rupert Murdoch and a few other villains.

[dustthouart.livejournal.com]

According to Wikipedia (at least the way the article looks right now), the worst part of this thing is that a bunch of Scandinavian royals can't attend Queen Margrethe's birthday party.

Untold economic losses and people separated from their loved ones < rich people unable to eat cake.

Oh Wikipedia.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

To be fair, this is developping into a really unprecedent travelling disaster, with literally millions of people stuck in the wrong country for at least two days now. The punch in BA's stomach now seems like rather a small thing as compared with what is happening all over northern Europe. But I still regard it as the silver lining in the cloud.

[elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com]

I saw that volcano on CNN at the gym this morning. And I suspect the unions over there are different than the ones here, because most of ours aren't worth the powder to blow them to hell.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Any trades union can go power mad. So can any bloc of employers. The point is not to use the State as a club in the service of either.

[elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com]

The problem over here is that a lot of them have evolved into protection for incompetent workers, which sucks.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

It also bothers me that I called on the name of God, not really in vain, but rather in jest, just before I found myself facing real moral ugliness - see my three next posts - and found myself calling on Him in a much more serious way. I do think that macho managers and people who take advantage of the crisis to kick their own employees in the face deserve anything they can get, but I wish my expression had not been so light.

[pathology-doc.livejournal.com]

This (i.e. the strike) would explain why, when my family and I travelled over Easter, there were BA jets sitting rather forlornly in a distant corner of the airport. I know sometimes even a 747 or 777 can't be afforded airbridge space in a busy airport (when I first went to visit carlanime we were bussed out to the plane), but these two aircraft were... unusually remote from everything.

My next, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, question is "Who is going to go to the Icelandic volcano god and demand payment for his carbon credits?"

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I think that would be playing with fire - literally. Icelanders already owe several billions each to Britain and the Netherlands because of the collapse of three local banks that had got delusions of grandeur in the Masters Of The Universe age, and they are mad as Hell, both with their bankers and with the British and Dutch - who seem to think that a country of 250,000 can find umpteen billion Euros in their children's piggy banks. Any further suggestion would probably get the suggester fed to the said volcano gods.

[panobjecticon.livejournal.com]

i don't think they have volcano gods, just lots of hidden people and santas in every hillside. some of them were probably working on mr ahmedinajad's letter to santa just prior to the 'eruption'...

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Well, you talk with Surtur, after whom the recent volcanic island Surtsey was named.