As someone directly affected by the strike and a former frequent flyer with British Airways, I should declare some interest in the outcome. However, it is also interesting to observe the contradictory accounts of the causes of the situation whereby the two parties have come to such an impasse. Are the strikers being selfish for spoiling our Christmas (and failing to understand the ‘reality’ of the recession) or is this just the beginning of new battleground between selfish capital and the individuals at the ‘coalface’ of the service industry which now supports the majority of the UK economy and household incomes? Will we be chronicling the decline of the Thames Valley(s) (easy driving distance from Heathrow) as we do the Welsh Valleys after the miners’ strike?
The cabin crew are saying that it is not about money – perhaps due to the fact that they are relatively well paid and treated compared to the budget airline factory systems against whom BA increasingly competes head to head –rather they seem to be saying it is about what customers value in terms of service and quality from the BA brand. Capital and concepts of service have always been uneasy bedfellows; essentially any ‘brilliant’ service is almost certainly ‘uneconomic’ or ‘not economically viable’ to quote the mantra of the capitalist realist. This is perhaps best illustrated by a story which used to do the rounds at BA when I consulted there with the Executive Club. Nordstrom – an up-market department store in the States was renowned for giving its staff responsibility for customer service (rule #1 = use good judgment in all situations, #2 = there will be no additional rules) and always accepting returns however old the product. In this particular urban legend a man returned a set of car tyres which were accepted even though Nordstrom had never sold car tyres. The ‘good judgment’ of Nordstrom is not a rational calculation of value or return on investment but rather a values based or ethical judgment. The application of practical rather than pure reason?
Just witness how banks deal with service when the demands of capital become paramount (and its supply becomes scarce) or how private equity deals with the ownership of businesses who are similarly generous with their intangible capital such as design authenticity, commitment, going the extra mile, etc.
At the recommendation of Will Davies (Potlatch et al), I read Mark Fisher’s book Capitalist Realism this week, which is a critique of a world which seems to accept the rationality of markets and capital as natural and necessary. The very concept of economic ‘viability’ which creates images of a capital exercising some sort of ‘right to die’ over senile business models who are reliant on life support for their existence. It is no small irony that perhaps people who became lecturers (who could hardly be accused of "doing it for the money" such as Mark Fisher) are now some of the most economically measured, controlled and evaluated individuals in the UK where every output is measured in terms of economic ‘value’ or ‘return’. Cabin staff are saying that Willie Walsh and BA’s ‘director of people’ (a nicely euphemistic yet strangely still depersonalizing job description for human resources) want to change what BA is into a ‘budget airline’, pandering the needs of the market rather than respecting the relationship and history of the BA brand with its customers. However, they have made this statement by attacking the very people and good will upon which their argument is based, arguably destroying it forever and hastening BA’s passage into commodity status.
Is Walsh the arch capitalist? Are the cabin crew defenders of tradition or guilty of sentimental nostalgia for an age when flying still had romance? BA’s argument seems to centre around its status as a nationally important utility (also an argument used by BAA) which in turn reduces its role to merely a ‘pipe’ (or rather flying tube) the ownership of which is open to the highest bidder in the modern, globalised world of infrastructure funds. Meanwhile the cabin crew want to defend the social capital which makes BA a ‘discretionary choice’ that is based on values not value alone. However, you might argue that both are doing too little too late. BA has a long way to go (and some very expensive office space to offload) before it becomes the world’s favourite Aldi of the skies, and the cabin crew can’t always be relied upon not to hide behind their brand and their ‘regulations’ (driven mainly by the demands of capital and management) such that their customers’ cup of good will still runneth over. However, the real ‘creative destruction’ is being wrought not by the budget entrepreneurs but by the cultural naivety of the union reps in choosing the one time of year when their members’ point was proven (when we fly for romantic reasons not just because we have to) and truly is a case of shooting themselves in the foot with both barrels.
So perhaps rather than resolving a complex and long running dispute within a company which was always being torn between competing politics – this dispute perhaps demonstrates the inability of outdated models of revolution and class war to resolve modern dilemmas – not unlike the phoney war currently being fought in that other out of date and out of touch institution – The Houses of Parliament.
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