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
42 Responses to “Why the Easyjet pay dispute matters”
blarg1987
Can we see a link to those figures? As I want to know how they quantify the data, for example to they class Boeing and Airbus as state or private?
Secondly, once you transfer people and support services from what are private organisations in other countries to organisations that are state controlled here, how do the figures look?
engine85
So, my facts and figures were just about perfect and your telling me to check my facts . .
The daily mail is a blog, nothing more, i gather no facts from it at all, facts come from companies like glassdoor and payscale. Also, i know the young gent that used to train the cabin crew, although he’s not so young anymore, so i know exactly what training you recieve. I’m also aware, that easyjet only carry a basic forst aid kit, they were criticised by EASA in 2010 for not even carrying equipment to measure blood pressure and sugar levels.
Getting everyone off the ‘aircraft’ (i used to work for Airbus) is simply a matter of opening the bloody door, if it actually crashes, your all dead.
engine85
I suggest you contact the ONS as i do not know the complete breakdown of their figures, both the ONS and EU websites are available to the general public.
I would be amazed if Boeing or Airbus would be included, why would they be, they are both private companies that have nothing whatsoever to do with the state, they are not even UK companies. Airbus has its headquarters in the Netherlands, it is entirely independent and not even part of EADS anymore. Boeing has even less to do with the UK, they are entirely US based.
Please give me an example of a private enterprise moving to the uk and being brought under UK state control, in fact, for it to make any difference to those figures, it would need to have a workforce of hundreds of thousands of people.
PeterMBeck
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blarg1987
The MOD is buying the A400M of Airbus, whose wings are built in the UK.
Airbus does get a lot of work from the state for example, its helicopters etc.
The same goes for Boeing and as you have admitted in your earlier comment state contractors which Boeing and Airbus would be classified as, should be counted appropriately in those countries comparisons.