A high court in the U.K. has ordered British Airways cabin crews not to strike over Christmas:
The dispute at BA centres on its desire to cut costs by reducing cabin staff on most flights and limiting wage increases. The airline’s pilots and engineers have already accepted austerity measures; cabin staff, notified of the proposed changes in July, are less inclined to compromise (though some have taken voluntary redundancy). On December 14th Unite, the union which represents almost all of the company’s 13,500 cabin staff, said they had voted overwhelmingly to strike.
The next day BA applied to London’s High Court for an injunction to stop them. The airline argued that Unite had not polled its members correctly: some votes were recorded from people no longer employed by BA, and the call for industrial action did not specify the intention to strike for 12 consecutive days precisely at Christmas. Had members known those details, fewer might have supported a strike, BA argued. The judge agreed, and ruled against the strike.
... Willie Walsh, the airline’s punchy Irish chief executive, was appointed in 2005 to knock such practices into competitive shape. He is unlikely to yield much ground to union militancy. It seems that BA’s core shareholders support him: the share price hardly moved when the strike was announced. Many reckoned that the benefits of BA’s restructuring outweighed the likely damage from the threatened strike. Estimates of potential net revenue loss over the 12 days ranged from £60m to £160m, whereas the benefits of restructuring were put by some analysts at £60m a year.
That court order can't have helped the union. Generally I'm sympathetic to organized labor, being a leftie with some knowledge of labor history, but the union here scored an own goal, as they say in Britain. I'll be on a BA flight in late January, and I can't wait to find out first hand what the cabin crews really think.