The Two-Hundred-Million Pound Strike : The 2003 British Airways Walkout, By Ed Blissett, (2021) Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, New York, Wein : Peter Lang, xiv + 214 pages. ISBN : 978-1-80079-059-9

On Friday 18 July 2003, slightly fewer than 500 customer service agents (CSAs) employed by British Airways (BA) walked off the job in protest over its decision to fully automate attendance management, shift rosters and holiday allocation on the following Sunday. “The CSAs were predominately young women from a variety of different ethnic backgrounds” (p. 3). Their walkout constituted an unofficial strike and was called without a legally required secret ballot. In addition, unions and their officials, both fulltime and lay, were legally required to denounce such unauthorized strikes and order the workers to return to work. By refusing to do so, the union officials could be prosecuted and the lay officials in particular could be dismissed. BA decided to introduce its new system at the busiest time of the year : the beginning of the summer holidays. The CSAs returned to work the next day, after BA gave an assurance it would temporarily withdraw its new system and enter into negotiations with the unions to resolve the dispute. Operationally, BA took four days to get its flight schedule back to “normal,” losing an estimated £200 million and three senior executives, who, in what is known as “management speak,” were allowed to find “new opportunities.” Negotiations were conducted over the next ten days, with BA eventually agreeing not to introduce its new system. Though illegal, the CSA walkout proved to be an overwhelming success. Ed Blissett was a fulltime union official with the GMB Union (formerly the General, Municipal and Boilermakers Union), which represented CSA members at Terminal 1 at London Heathrow Airport. The Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU) represented CSAs at Terminal 4. Terminals 1 and 4 were approximately equal and relatively large in terms of CSA representation. CSAs also worked at the smaller Terminal 5, where they were represented by the Amicus Trade Union (Amicus). Several years afterward Blissett pursued a PhD and became an academic. In 2014 his PhD dissertation was published under the title Inside the Unions : A Comparative Analysis of Policy-Making in Australian and British Printing and Telecommunication Trade Unions. This study broke new ground in documenting disagreements and disputes within unions. His methodology was to interview, on strict condition of anonymity, over 220 officials about various internal struggles and disputes over how to respond to pressures on their respective unions. Blissett was a highly regarded (former) union official and could thus gain the confidence of his interviewees in both countries. In 2018, he decided to conduct research and produced an account of the 2003 BA dispute, a dispute in which he had played a major part in its ultimate settlement ; his involvement, as we will see, was viewed by some as being somewhat controversial. Besides drawing on his records of formal and informal meetings, as well as documents and secondary sources, Blissett decided to replicate the method he had employed in Inside the Unions. He sought permission from various persons involved in the dispute to obtain their recollections of the causes, events and eventual resolution of the dispute, on strict condition of anonymity. Not all those he approached agreed, but most did. He interviewed 48 unionists, ranging from fulltime to part-time officials and lay members, and 15 BA managers. Though he does not say so, these individuals probably enjoyed the chance to reminisce about that major event in their respective working lives. Blissett is aware of the problems of providing an account of a dispute in which he was a major participant. He says : His method and his being a “Johnny on the spot” give his narrative an extra …