The wildcat sympathy strike at British Airways is wonderfully inspiring and a real victory for working people around the world. Of course, the mass media is emphasizing the nightmare stories of tourists stuck in traveler’s limbo, and complaining that this isn’t even British Airways’ fault. Like hell, it’s not.
Like many modern corporations, British Airways has subcontracted a major department – its in-flight food service – to another company. You come across this all the time, even if you’re not aware of it. If you stay at a hotel, but eat breakfast at its restaurant, that restaurant is probably owned and operated by a separate company. If you purchase a computer and call technical support, you’re probably speaking to an employee of another company – based on another continent. The motivation of the boss is to cut costs and remove extraneous concerns.
An airline already has to pay and manage pilots, flight attendants, grounds crews, reservations agents, customer service call centers and so on and so forth. Add to that all the considerations and payroll of running an in-flight food service: the staff, the decisions, the menus. So, British Airways simply hired another company to do work that the airline itself once did, and it probably hired that company at a lower cost than the operations once cost the airline directly. How does the subcontractor provide the same services at a lower cost? Through “scientific management,” also known as “sweating the workers.” Faster, harder, cheaper. Work, work, work. Cut corners. Limit the menus. Slash the wages.
In the drive to cut costs and raise profits, this company – American-based Gate Gourmet – abruptly fired 670 of its workers last Thursday. Those workers might have received paychecks from a different payroll processor, but they worked alongside the grounds workers, flight attendants and pilots of British Airways, and, seeing their coworkers summarily dismissed from their jobs like that, the workers at British Airways protested by walking off the job and throwing the airline into complete and utter turmoil.
So don’t go shedding any tears for poor, innocent British Airways. They established the low budgets in food service that forced Gate Gourmet to cut those jobs. They are every bit as much the boss as the company that actually fired those 670 workers. The workers at British Airways and Gate Gourmet are holding both corporations responsible for the management decisions that take place at the work site. In so doing, these workers have drawn a line in the sand across the globe. They are saying your corporate shenanigans will not shield you from your responsibility to negotiate with your workers. Solidarity extends across payroll departments.