Unions back to the 70's?

[chaggle]

From The Telegraph

Cabin crew were asked by the airline to lower the shades after passengers disembark because direct sunlight can cause aircraft cabins to become uncomfortably hot while the planes are parked on stands.

The memo, seen by The Sunday Telegraph, says: "It has been brought to our attention that crew are being asked to close all the window blinds at the end of each flight. This has not been agreed with BASSA [branch of Unite] and no safe working practice has been trialled.

"The normal practice when anything new is introduced is that the Health, Safety and Welfare committee would carry out a risk assessment to confirm that everything is safe.

I thought this kind of idiocy had been left well behind.

[asthmatic camel]

You can expect to see a good deal more of this in the months to come, particularly in the public sector. Don't expect Tony Woodley and Derek Simpson to take any pay cuts while they're doing their best to put Unite union members out of work.

Bloody hypocrites.

[Admin]

Don't expect Tony Woodley and Derek Simpson to take any pay cuts while they're doing their best to put Unite union members out of work.

Ultimately, that's probably what will end up happening.

I must say that if I had to fly somewhere and I had a choice of airlines, I'd make sure that I didn't fly with BA. Customers simply want to get from A to B and if one airline is constantly threatened by strike action then you just choose another one.

[Drop Bear]

I was a unionist all of my working life and a rep for over ten years.

I have no wish to return to the corrupt practices of our more notorious unions on the docks and in the building industry.

However, in my opinion.Industrial legislation in Australia has gone too far too the right. In some industries workers can actually be gaoled for striking and anyone can be fined or gaoled for striking against the orders of the Industrial court to return to work.


The right to strike is basic in a free society,it is the only real weapon a worker has against exploitation. If employer could be trusted to treat workers fairy there would be no need for unions.


I comment here on a principle. I have insufficient information for an informed opinion in the case mentioned.

[Croydon Bob]

To quote one alleged incident reported in the Torygraph, or one specific Union, and try to run with an "all Unions are dinosaurs" story is Daily Mail thinking at its worst. One might just as well claim that BP's oil spill proves that all companies are evil dinosaurs whose time has come and they should all be abolished and replaced with the popular will of the masses (under my personal control obviously). Or, one example of the police killing a drunk passer-by proves that they all abuse their rights and that they should all have all their powers taken away.

[asthmatic camel]

Bob, only the most hard-line free marketeers would deny that unions are necessary, and play an important role in protecting their members. That said, if you want to find what remains of the hard left, you don't need to look much futher than the TUC. My wife's union, the PCS, constantly calls for strike action and threatens those who don't comply with the withdrawal of their support. All this normally achieves is that everyone loses a days pay, which many really can't afford.

With a weak coalition government in power, watch the gloves come off as the cuts begin to bite.

[Tony Williams]

I agree that unions have an important role, but they are sometimes their own worst enemies. In my previous life as a public sector manager, I had frequent meetings with union officials, and I noticed that they fell into two groups.

One consisted of those who were primarily concerned with the welfare of their members and tried to achieve this through constructive negotiation, taking the trouble to understand the management's position so that a mutually satisfactory conclusion could be reached.

The other group were viscerally opposed to management, always assumed the worst of us, and wanted to fight the class war. Very often, their entire feelings of self-worth seemed to be bound up in how successful they could be in blocking whatever management proposed, regardless of its merits. They "got off" on conflict, and enjoyed nothing better than a good protest rally or a strike, since that elevated their importance in their own eyes.

Sadly, I also noticed that the first group were a declining species threatened with extinction. I sometimes managed to wean some of the second group into more reasonable positions, but it was constant hard work.

[Croydon Bob]

the PCS,

I worked as a policy advisor for the last Govt, was a CPSA/PCS union rep in my youth, and PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka lives in Croydon. So I'm aware of the PCS, the only trot-controlled Union that has representatives on the TUC General Council. But they're a mixed bunch, I can counter your anecdote with the PCS branch in DVLA: a couple of years ago the Tory supporting branch officers were collaborating with management and agreeing to anything and everything without democratic votes, or consulting members, leading to staff being thousands of pounds a year short of colleagues doing identical work in other agencies. The PCS in the Met Police aren't noted for being radical either, and one of the most reactionary racist Sun readers I ever met was a PCS rep in the Immigration Services in Croydon.

[asthmatic camel]

Ah well, we'll have to wait and see how it all plays out. Now may well be a good time to review your investments and take a cautious approach; I have.

[tolman]

Playing devil's advocate a little:

While it's certainly possible that the idea of a health+safety committee involvement in blind-closing is unnecessary, I guess there is at least an arguable case for involvement except in cases when there's clearly absolutely no need.

I think that in at least some planes, there's no obvious alignment between windows and seat rows.
If crew were being pushed to close all the blinds in a plane as quickly as possible, could that result in people being tempted to avoid walking down every row, instead reaching out as far as possible backwards and forwards from every other row, even every third row?
In at least some planes, with some shapes of cabin crew, could there be possible injury risks from doing that (slipping while kneeling on a seat with an arm between seat/headrest and airplane wall, etc?), especially if in a plane with no alignment where the necessary reach could vary from one row to the next, and where some blinds may be stiffer than others?

Surely, the point of a health and safety committee is to look at what people are being asked to do, then look at how various people might be tempted to do it, and see if there are things that people might need to be told to avoid doing before someone does do something that injures them?

[chaggle]

tolman - these people are paid an average of £30,000 per year (and I'm sure they are very good and I'm sure they deserve it in many ways).

They should be able to close blinds without too much trouble. There are many people who perform hazardous duties for much less. I do.

Do you really think that this is anything other than a union being snotty?

[tolman]

Do you really think that this is anything other than a union being snotty?

I guess that rather depends on how various people might be tempted to do a particular task if they were (or felt they were) under time pressure to do it.

The best way to find that out would seem to be to watch different people doing the task at different speeds in different planes and see how they were doing it and whether there were any meaningful risks of injury from doing the task in any of the ways people might reasonably be tempted to do it.

Isn't that the kind of thing that health/safety/welfare people would generally do when any non-trivial task was proposed?
What's the point having such people if the only things they ever get to look at are those where any risks are blindingly obvious? Surely one of their main values (if they're any good) is perceiving possible problems in marginal cases and making sure those possible bad things don't happen?

Personally, I have cut corners in various ways in various jobs involving electricity, heights, chemicals, etc, in an attempt to save time, generally with some decent appreciation of the likely risks, and without expecting or suggesting anyone else copies me, but then analysing risk is something I do tend to give some thought to, possibly more so than an average person might.

I expect that a great many other people also try and cut corners, especially when it comes to things like end-of-shift tidying activities, which also seem likely to be times when people are at their most tired, rushed, and possibly most stressed and distracted.

Also, on the formal side, if the procedure is that any changes to working practices are referred to a health/safety/welfare committee as a matter of course, if someone sees that hasn't been done, it does seem to be the thing to do to point it out.
That way either management officially says it's not important enough to bother the committee with (and therefore takes responsibility), or they refer it on to see if the committee considers it worth doing anything about.

Whether you or I or anyone else might consider someone's formal language in a memo to be 'snotty' or not isn't necessarily relevant - the memo wasn't written for my benefit, or yours.

It seems to me that the basic question in some environments may not be 'Can a given task be done safely?', but 'Could someone find a way to do it unsafely?'.

Whether I'd prefer a more at-your-own-risk approach doesn't really enter into it, and without knowing the detailed history and logic of a particular setup, there are limits on what judgements I can reasonably make about the appropriateness of any specific action in that setup.

[sandgrinder]

From The Telegraph

.... The memo, seen by The Sunday Telegraph, says: ....

I thought this kind of idiocy had been left well behind.

If you read a little further there's this:

A spokesman for Unite said it had "repudiated" the memo because unofficial action was illegal, and said the instruction should be ignored.

To clarify ... that is the so-called "union" instruction (contained in the "memo") that should be ignored. Because, in the view of Unite, it is not an official union instruction.

It would appear that the "idiocy" you speak of, if this Telegraph article is the only source of your concern, has indeed "been left well behind".

If The Telegraph had so chosen they could have easily headlined that article:

Union tells BA cabin crew to do what management say when told to lower blinds

... but then doing that would kinda go against the grain, don't you think?

[sandgrinder]

Bob, only the most hard-line free marketeers would deny that unions are necessary, and play an important role in protecting their members .....

Hear! Hear!