Cabin crew conflict: the British Airways dispute 2009–11

• Published date: 01 July 2020
• Date: 01 July 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12170

© 2020 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Book review 255

New Technology, Work and Employment 35:2

ISSN 0268-1072

Book Review

Cabin crew conict: the British Airways dispute 2009–11,

Phil Taylor and Sian Moore (2019), London: Pluto Press, £20 hardback, 224 pages.

This book tells the story of the British Airways Cabin Crew, members of the

trade union BASSA, who in 2009 embarked on a historic battle to protect their

working conditions and their union in the face of legal obstruction, government

opposition, employer counter-mobilisation and media hostility. They undertook

22 days of strike action in a campaign that lasted two years with mixed results.

The positive result was that management’s attempt to break the union and frag-

ment the collective organisation of one of the strongest sections of organised

labour in the UK failed. They ensured that BASSA remained intact and managed

to recover much of what had been lost in the dispute, including staff travel al-

lowances—an essential benet for cabin crew. On the negative side, British Airways

succeeded in adding another tier of cabin crew on inferior terms and conditions

to its already tiered workforce and won further concessions on working practices

and labour exibilities. However, the book concludes with the uplifting account

of the far-from-compliant new mixed eet workers, who engaged in successful

industrial action in 2016 and 2017 against the inferior terms and conditions in-

troduced after the 2009–11 dispute.

The Preface by Duncan Holley, branch secretary of BASSA from May 1998 to

June 2012, is an emotive opening and revealed that I, along with other academics,

played a small part in the story. In 2010, I signed the letter in the Guardian1

against the actions of Willie Walsh’s attempts to break the union by challenging

ballots for strike action through the courts. Duncan Holley tells us how much

the letter meant to the striking workers, providing ‘a beacon of light that shone

through the gloom’ (p. xv). This was a moving insight into the impact of the

letter. It felt clear at the time that the dispute was about management trying to

wrangle more power from workers by fragmenting work contracts resulting in

increased managerial discretion. This interpretation is supported in the book through

detailed testimonies about management surveillance of cabin crew employees and

examples of bullying and harassment of employees taking legitimate industrial

action.

The introductory chapter provides a highly accessible account of theories and

research on strikes. Using a Marxist analytical framework, the authors situate

their research by drawing on seminal studies (see page 9) to show how they

contribute to the tradition of using rst hand participant accounts to explore the

processes, dynamics, meanings and signicance of strikes from the bottom up,

which are located within their institutional, political-economic and social contexts.

The rst chapter also sets out the methodological approach detailing the authors’

aim to tell the story of the dispute through the oral testimonies of those

involved.

The rest of the book is structured as follows. Chapter 2 sets out the background

to the dispute, detailing changes in the regulation of the aviation sector and

cost-cutting pressures, and the growing antagonism between BA and BASSA.

Chapter 3–6 present different themes and phases of the dispute told mainly through

the oral testimonies of cabin crew union representatives and members. Chapter

3 sheds light on the impact of intensied cost-cutting measures on staff, and how

this led to high levels of stress, but also triggered a renewed sense of collective