The Easyjet dispute highlights important lessons for building better businesses and a fairer society
Easyjet cabin crew are to vote over the coming month on potential strike action this August.
Their dispute over the company’s offer of a small pay increase highlights some important lessons for building better businesses and a better society.
Firstly, that Unions have a vital role to play in addressing low pay and the gaping income gap between those at the top and everybody else.
These are problems that everybody wants to solve.
However the left might caricature the Tories, they’re not sitting in castles chuckling about inequality. Prior to the election David Cameron exhorted businesses to give their staff a payrise. Boris Johnson said this week that the top rate of tax should not come down without a significant increase in the minimum wage. He’s previously stated that we need to shake ‘the cornflake packet’ to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to get to the top, and has fulminated against the ‘extraordinary’ growth in income differences within British companies.
The problem is that merely talking about these issues – usually alongside implausibly optimistic platitudes about the role of education making things better in the future – will not improve the current pay and conditions of ordinary workers or achieve a fairer balance of incomes between those at the top and everybody else.
What is really needed – and even the International Monetary Fund and Hedge Fund billionaires recognise/fear this – is an empowered workforce, with trade union representation giving them the capability to secure a better deal for themselves, rather than hoping for a hand-out from their employers inspired by politicians speeches.
Easyjet workers are showing how workers can fight for a better deal; but it happens too rarely in Britain, where we have amongst the lowest level of collective bargaining coverage and worker participation in company decision-making in Europe.
The second lesson from the Easyjet dispute relates to excessive executive pay, and how it does companies no favours whatsoever. Research for the High Pay Centre found that industrial conflicts are more common in workplaces with bigger pay gaps. Easyjet CEO Carolyn McCall was paid £7.7 million last year, more than 150 times the average Easyjet employee. According to Unite the Union, many cabin crew staff get little over £10,000 as their basic salary and are reliant on bonuses and commission to top up their total pay package.
Mccall’s pay was cited by the Easyjet Union when rejecting the company’s pay offer, just as ITV staff brought up CEO Adam Crozier’s £8 million pay package when balloting for industrial action last year. It’s no wonder that this kind of different treatment for people who are working for the same company and contributing to its success proves irksome, increasing the likelihood of industrial conflict.
Easyjet has, of course, been successful, with pre-tax profits of over £500 million last year. But it’s legitimate to question the value of such successes to the wider economy, when a tiny number of people grab a disproportionate share of the rewards.
Luke Hildyard is a contributing editor at Left Foot Forward. Follow him on Twitter
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42 Responses to “Why the Easyjet pay dispute matters”
engine85
The average Easyjet salary is 16k plus bonuses, they net £1200 – 1600 a month, and they typically work 2 days and get 1 day off, which means they average over 20k a year, thats pretty good, for what is usually an individual with very few or often no qualifications and just 4 weeks training. I count many easyjet pilots on my friend list, as well as several of their QA staff. Many, many companies have folded over the years due to unqualified, unskilled, untrained idiots going on stike because the union told them they should be earning 25-30k+ PA (todays market) this is simply unrealistic for unskilled, unqualified staff. Just like the idiot tube drivers in the table below . .
The jobs the last labour government created are now bankrupting the country, as they are generally unskilled people working in ‘created’ posts for local government on salaries they don’t deserve. Labour took this country, for the first time in its history, to 70% of the population working for the government, but its a scam, it looks great on paper, it ‘appears’ to create jobs, but these people are paid from tax, therefore the tax they pay is simply tax going around in circles, they create no wealth, they are actually a drain on the state, it would be cheaper to pay them welfare, only the private sector generates wealth, thats a fact, and the unions can never get it into their thick heads, they simply want the rich to line the pockets of the legions of bone idle, lazy shits that will NEVER work for a living and simply want state handouts and free housing forever. And thats the state that Labour created, a welfare state.
It cannot be sustained, it is simply a mathematical impossibility. It has been proved, time and time again, by finanacial analysts the world over, that the wealthy create wealth, the more money you leave in the pockets of the wealthy, the richer the working classes become, but Labour and the trade unions simply cannot work that out, every single Labour government we’ve ever had has bankrupted the country, fact.
If i pay you 100k a year, and then take 50k of you in tax, i redistribute that tax to state employees or the unemplyed, and you get pissed off, and the unemployed stay unemployed and ultimately, nobody gains. If i take 10k in tax for just the essential services, then you keep 90k, you are very happy and you spend lots of money, it doesn’t matter what you buy, whether its a new car or a bigger house, or simply spend more in sainsbury’s, because you are indirectly employing 2-3 people because the shops are busier, manufacturers are selling more goods. then we have 4 people working instead of 1, so 4 people paying tax instead of 1, plus we get more corporate tax because companies are selling more goods. EVERYBODY WINS.
danash123
That’s right. According to many on the right the unions almost brought civilisation as we know it to its knees in the 70s so they had to be crushed. Meanwhile the banks have created more damage and cost us more than every strike in history lumped together and it’s business as usual.
blarg1987
Is that the average across the whole of Europe or UK rates? And how does it compare to their European counter parts?
Just to clarify, what is your evidence that 70% of the population work for the state, or do you include companies that have state contracts or for,er state companies such as railways, energy sector etc?
engine85
That figure comes from the ONS and EU, that was in 2010, 53% were public sector employees working directly for the state, state contractors took it over 70% (total state spending)
In 2010, Australia had a TOTAL of 33% the USA 42%, we had just 52% TOTAL in 1997, the average across Europe is 53%. It was simply a massive job creation scheme, and it cannot be sustained, it should be the other way around, 30% state 70% private sector. To make things worse, these people often draw salaries way above their education or qualification level, with even bigger pensions that they did not pay for. Somebody has to pay for this. A family member of mine is a prime example, she has no qualifications, she is just a clerk, she should be on minimum wage somewhere, but she works in one of these created jobs in the NHS, she earns over 30k a year, and has a huge pension that she pays very little towards, she is basically having 50% of her salary and her pension being paid for by someone wealthy (and i’m not talking millionares here, doctors/lawyers and the like), that wealthy person, who is likely from a working class background that worked hard at school (unlike her) to get a well paid job, is giving 20% of his salary to top up hers and pay her pension. In what universe is that fair ? ?
1% of the population already pay 50% of the state income (tax is the only source of state income) how much more would you like them to pay ? ? If you push it too high, they simply go and live somewhere else.
Ben blake
FYI I am ex easyJet cabin crew and I can tell you that we work a flexible roster, typically 5 long days and 2 or 3 off. A typical day is 4 short or medium flights or 2 longer flights which is typically 12 hours but can be 14. And we are trained for just under 6 weeks not to serve tea and coffee but to get everybody off the plane in an emergency or give life saving medical treatment at 36000 feet.
I was earning 1500 after tax on a good month but I had to fly 80 hours and sell a lot of tea and coffee to come out with that. It doesn’t go far living in the South east of England.
Stop getting your facts from the Daily Mail and start educating yourself.