Come into this quite late, but I see that there was a lot of talk about pensions earlier. BA, along with a lot of major UK companies, took a holiday on paying the employer contributions into their company pension plans when times were good back in the late 90s, early naughties - nothing to do with union interference, in fact the unions were urging them to keep up their contributions. The result? Amongst BA's other problems is a £3.7 BILLION shortfall in their pension scheme. Nice decision by the board at the time, all of which will (of course) have their own pension pots protected....
On the subject of non-union labour, we at least have a law in this country that prevents direct hiring to do the work of striking workers. There has been a recent dispute that's gone to court (not sure of the outcome yet) where our postal workers struck and the Post Office hired a load of temporary workers. The PO said that the higher than normal number of temps was to deal with the run up to Xmas (hired 6 weeks earlier than normal) and would only work on clearing the backlog from the strike. Lots of grey areas in these laws, if you take a close look....
Edited, Dec 19th 2009 6:25am by Kelanthor