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BA Pilots pay dispute
Having just averted a strike of BA’s check-in staff with a new pay offer, now BALPA, the BA pilot union are alleged to be considering a ballot for industrial action, according to The Telegraph.
BA had originally been reluctant to offer ground staff a large pay rise in case it triggered a ripple effect with other groups of employees, and it would appear they were right to be concerned.
The pilots are traditionally a fairly conservative group when it comes to strike action. British Airways pilots worked together to agree to reduce job losses by agreeing to give up part of their salary to keep jobs. The initial pay cut was 20% falling to 8% over the following two years. This meant that instead of losing 1,255 jobs, they only lost 270 pilot jobs. However, understandably, pilots want to get their pay back now the travel demand has returned. I can see both sides in that they signed up for the agreement. However, travel is back with a vengeance, so I don’t think BA can wheel out the #covidexcuse when saying they don’t want to at a minimum restore pay. The agreement was also for a specific purpose which is no longer needed now. The pilots want a pay rise rather than a pay cut.
It’s interesting that BA recently created a new Director of Industrial Relations role as if they anticipated more issues. BA pilots last voted for strike action in summer 2019, which was finally resolved with a revised pay offer. Given the tough times pilots have been through, I can see there being a less than generous outlook towards BA by pilots in this dispute.
As yet, nothing has been decided. Hopefully, they manage to sort it out around the table as the last thing that customers and the travel industry need right now is more uncertainty and disruption.
A union source said:
“‘BA seems to ignore you until you issue a ballot,’ is the sentiment among members. Within Balpa we don’t usually like to do that. We would rather take a grown-up approach. But we are under enormous pressure. And the longer this goes on, the harder it gets.”
A spokesman for British Airways said: “We remain committed to continuing talks with the union.”
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UK government don’t know if travel restrictions worked
In the damning report released on Tuesday, it is clear that, as we all expected, there was no clear science behind many of the measures the government took to impose restrictions on travel during Covid. Even now, they still have no evidence to suggest whether the restrictions were worth the massive fallout to the travel industry and people not being able to travel to see loved ones etc.
I always suspected that many of the Covid restrictions were just plucked out of the air as they seemed like a good idea. Even when independent data proved many of the travel restrictions to be completely worthless in trying to control Covid, the government insisted on continuing with them.
Apparently, it cost “at least £486 million” to implement the traffic light scheme, yet the government still “does not know whether the system worked or whether the cost was worth the disruption caused”. I’m sure we all remember eagerly awaiting the next announcement of green destinations only to find they were some remote island that you couldn’t even reach! I distinctly remember Malta taking weeks to go green despite cases being less than 10 per week for the whole island! The report says that the government did not take time to explain its reasoning behind decisions – I suspect because a lot of the time these were political decisions rather than logical, science based decisions.
The committee also criticised how the government kept changing the rules (more than 10 times between February 2021 and January 2022) making it hard for the travel industry to keep up and even harder for travellers to understand.
The red list hotel isolation was a particular failure given that it was meant to be self-funding. In total, the quarantine service cost £757 million with the taxpayer subsidising a shocking £329 million. This is despite it costing more than £2,200 for a single adult over 10 days. I do believe there is very limited use for hotel quarantine to buy time over a short period when a new variant or disease is discovered until more is known about it. But eventually, all countries end up with cases and community spread, so it pointless as a long term measure.
Hopefully, we never go down that route again and lessons have been learnt, but I am not convinced.
11 comments
The story around the UK government knowing if travel restrictions actually worked or not doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. Let’s face it, do the government ever keep records of how well things work? Jess it’s to their advantage of course ….
£370 per night for my wife and I to stay in a quarantine hotel – you do not pay the hotel but a ‘travel consultancy’ company. It could not have cost the ‘travel consultancy’ company more than £50 per night and they used the NHS for testing so there no cost to them there. And now we hear that the Government subsidised quarantine hotels to the extent of £329 million! There must be an enquiry into who made millions out of this, or maybe it explains the reason for implementing the what appears to be a daft system.
Agreed it would be very interesting who made the big profits here. Seeing the food some people got it certainly didn’t go on that!
In a week when 2 tainted Johnson ministers are touting their wares to be PM, this report should be the main and frankly only news story. Mind boggling incompetence and inability to measure performance or track costs. Anyone around that Cabinet table should be barred from office.
Can you imagine if you ran a business like that?
Well yes, cos you’d probably stay afloat with a fradulent covid loan. Villains the lot of them!
The failure to act soon enough was a major cause of the perceived failure to control numbers of cases. Allowing UK tourists to mix with other international travellers at New Year / Christmas destinations is asking for a peak in case numbers and sure enough, 2 weeks into January, it came along, thanks to irresponsible travellers who proved the need for action to be taken to control such ridiculous behaviour.
The inability to travel was not however, just a UK outbound ban, it became a destination countries not wanting visitors coming in and the UK govt had no control over this.
I think New Zealand’s stance shows that a robust in / out policy saved lives.
Family reunions are not tourism. Not all travel that year was tourism. If you do want to talk tourism travel though, I’d put the Carbis Bay G7 in that category.
Regarding the rates available through Debonaire, could we book a week’s stay as two separate bookings i.e. one for my wife and one for me? For a week’s stay, the $100 credit is too small, especially when you will get the same $100 credit for a one night stay. By having two separate bookings, we aim to get $200 in credit. Don’t mind changing rooms.
Yes as long as you don’t mind moving rooms there is nothing to stop you having two bookings in two names. If it was all one name it could be an issue I think. But just double check with GTC (which Debonair are part of) when you book.
Since 2016 the UK has endured one government after another in nothing but chaos so it’s no surprise that the travel restrictions were a part of that. The utter chaos and uncertainty of red lists, amber lists, green lists, amber plus lists which didn’t match up to any data that was available anywhere was obvious to see. The failure to control travel from India when Delta was rising because Bunter wanted a trade deal was as good as criminal and yet they continue in the same vein barely now acknowledging that a significant number of people are still dying and the NHS is at breaking point.
I think a general election is called for, God help us if we have to have one of the two numptys standing to replace Bunter as PM for two years, there’ll be nothing left!
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