Its hard to look anywhere these days without hearing about the British Airways strike. I was very reluctant to write yet another post about something that’s been covered to death in both mainstream media as well as in the blogesphere, but now that the strike as been called off I feel I can add my two cents.

So what caused the flight crew to walk off the job over Christmas? Mainly, BA’s proposal to cut one staff per flight and freeze pay for two years. To be totally honest, I don’t think even that would be enough to stop the bleeding - BA lost £401m last year and it looks like it’s only going to get worse.

My first reaction to this was disappointment. Those of us that actually work in the travel industry have been through one of the worst years anyone can remember. We’ve all made sacrifices, we’ve all taken on more work than we thought we could handle and we did it happily because we had faith in our organizations as well as our industry to rebound. It will be very sad if these unions have destroyed BA’s chance to recover in 2010. There has already been murmurings that the strike may only have been postponed, further damaging consumer trust with the vague threat of a strike still looming.

I am all for employee rights and it’s never a good thing when someone loses their job, but sometimes these things cannot be avoided. Hopefully BA can get through this without any lasting effects; if not they will join the ranks of the many other UK airlines to go bust this year.