British Airways cabin crew reject latest pay deal

By -
Cabin crew at British Airways have rejected the airline’s latest peace offering meaning that further strike action could be on the horizon. Less than half the cabin crew eligible to vote on the pay deal did so, causing BA to put a positive slant on the ballot. The airline said that it was encouraged by the fact that 73 per cent of its cabin crew had not actually voted against the peace deal.

Unite union boss, Tony Woodley, admitted that the turnout for the vote had been lower than usual, and urged BA’s chief executive Willie Walsh to return to the negotiating table. He claimed that the result indicated that 85 per cent of BA’s cabin crew were not satisfied with the airline’s most recent offer.

Although Mr Woodley called for fresh peace talks, he did not rule out the possibility of further industrial action. Strikes since March have resulted in 22 days of walkouts by the airline’s cabin crew and have been estimated to have cost BA more than £150 million.

The new proposals offered cabin crew a pay increase of 2.9 per cent in 2011 with a further pay rise of three per cent in 2012. There was also a clause agreeing not to victimise members of staff who have already taken part in walkouts as well as a promise to partially reinstate travel benefits.

Before the latest ballot Unite said that it would not be advising its members on how to vote so that they would have the opportunity to make up their own minds.

Source : http://www.comparecarhire.co.uk/news/british-airways-cabin-crew-reject-latest-pay-deal-53819049.html

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should frequent flyers pay for the decarbonization of the air industry?

By -
Image
Researchers are proposing a frequent flyer tax to pay for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the airline industry. A new paper from the International Council on Clean Transportation proposed the tax as a way to fund some of the $121 billion that needs to get invested every year to decarbonize flying. "Varying the levy based on flying frequency focuses the tax burden on wealthier frequent flyers and helps ensure that people with lower incomes are not priced out of air travel because of climate policy," the study's authors, Xinyi Sola Zheng and Dan Rutherford, wrote. A sliding fee for flights beginning at $9 for the second flight and $177 for their twentieth in a given year would raise $121 billion -- versus a flat tax of $25 per ticket for all flights. For the study's authors, the tax is a way to avoid penalizing people in lower income brackets and shifting the load to the wealthiest 10 percent of the world's population. Not only would the revenues come from wea...
Read more

Autonomous aviation startup Xwing hits $400M valuation after latest funding round

By -
Image
  The safety pilot has his hands off the controls during an Xwing demonstration flight. Image Credits: Xwing Xwing has scored another win two months after it completed its first gate-to-gate autonomous demonstration flight of a commercial cargo aircraft. The company said Thursday it has raised $40 million at a post-money valuation of $400 million. The company is setting its sights on expansion — not only tripling its engineering team, but eventually running regular fully unmanned commercial cargo flights. Xwing has been developing a technology stack to convert aircraft, including a widely used Cessna Grand Caravan 208B, to function autonomously. But it’s had to solve a few problems first: “the perception problem, the planning problem and the control problem,” Xwing founder Marc Piette explained to TechCrunch. The company has come up with a whole suite of solutions to solve for these problems, including integrating lidar, radar and cameras on the plane; retrofitting the servomotors ...
Read more