So in 2008, @British_Airways increased their profits by 45% to £883 million, yet their rationale for cutting their workers' Ts & Cs & reducing the number of crew on the aircraft & creating @MFUnite crew on significantly diminished pay, terms & conditions was...

the economic recession and the exorbitant price of oil. Work with us, they said, through the lean times, for the survival of the company & ever after that, they enlarged their route network and increased their slots and bought whole new fleets of gleaming aircraft & expanded..

until ten years later, it turns out that it hadn’t been a fight for survival so much as a fight for extraordinary profit. £1.952 billion. In profit. Profit....

And while the CEO’s salary rose to over £3 million plus benefits over the same period (times having turned out to be not quite so lean after all), the workers’ wages fell in real terms and all new crew were employed on the new cheap contracts...

& when, periodically, the workers felt they had no alternative but to resort to taking strike action, the multi-million and, latterly, multi-billion pound profit making company did all they could to crush them & their bargaining power....

For the very survival of the company, they’d shriek, employing #unionbusters like @TheBurkeGroup & draft in other airlines like @QatarAirways & any improvement to pay, terms or conditions was never dolled out by them as a result of the extraordinary profits they were making.....

or a sense of, you know, decency, but rather won by the workers for the workers through their own struggle & #Solidarity & struggle. Because what with the price of oil or the ash cloud or Brexit or......

the volatile political situation or the markets or the exchange rates or the low cost airlines.....It was never a good time. And now, it turns out you can’t give oil away, and the low cost airlines are on their knees and all that, but......

happily, there's #coronavirus! The excuse of BA's dreams! Crew & other frontline workers on decent contracts, won over decades, made redundant by email or #firedandrehired on new contracts with vastly diminished pay, terms & conditions under cover of a pandemic - brilliant!...

& Lets not mention the taxpayers of the UK subsidising BA for the same workers to be furloughed for months on the Job Retention Scheme (note the name of the scheme).....

And next year, what's the betting that it's back to the price of oil? Anyone else think there’s something grossly, fundamentally f*cked with this whole stinking system? #SocialistSunday @BaBetrayal @BASSA_2000 @BAsolidarityMF @LeftFootFwd @LabourList @MirrorPolitics @politico