The injunction pronounced by the High Court against the Unite backed BA ‘Christmas strike’ was met with a general sense of relief by the wider public. Passengers could hardly fathom the possibility that ‘old style militancy’ of hot-headed unionised workers would spoil their long awaited Christmas treat abroad. As reported by an article on The Times, passengers overwhelmingly thought that the High Court decision to issue the injunction was ‘the right decision. [Passengers] could not understand the union over the whole period. They not only wanted to ruin everybody’s holidays but also kill the company’, the article reported. No doubt, once more, public opinion overwhelmingly sided with BA management and against the unions and BA workers. An online poll carried out by The Guardian provides some interesting number crunching. About 55% of all readers polled blamed unions and BA staff for the prospected strike, while ‘only’ 28% apportioned blame on BA’s ‘old style managerial’ tactics. Apparently, Derek Simpson (Unite’s joint secretary) and not Willie Walsh (BA’s boss) was this year’s Mr ‘Scrooge’.

The injunction was of course issued on a point of law, and – in theory at least – not to provide relief to disgruntled holidaymakers. During the workers’ consultations regarding the strike (often referred to as ‘the ballot’) the union had mistakenly asked some 800 members of staff on ‘voluntary’ redundancy (due to BA’s policy to encourage downsizing during these troubled times) to cast their vote, out of a total 12,700 workers. This was, as it turned out, in breach of the very strict, formalistic and formulaic, ‘balloting requirements’ first introduced in the 1980s by Mrs Thatcher. On these grounds alone Mrs Cox J, the High Court judge, issued her injunction blocking the strike. The overwhelming majority of BA workers, some 95%, had voted in favour of industrial action, and the computation of those 800 redundant workers made no material difference to the results of the ballot. But as it is often the case in UK labour laws, formalism trumps substance. BA crews won’t be allowed to strike this Christmas and we,members of the public, can once more have our cake and eat it, abroad, in a nice Viennese hotel.

Or maybe not! As it turns out, the adverse weather of the week preceding Christmas and Boxing Day has conspired once more against our holy-days. So, it seems, maybe we’ll end up being stuck in a Eurostar under the Channel tunnel on our way to Paris. Or we’ll end up being trapped in a mini-cab on the way to Stansted or Luton airport. Even worse, adding insult to injury, we may make it to our BA flight in plush Heathrow Terminal 5, only to find out that all flights are suspended due to the icy temperatures and heavy snowfall.

Our ‘wider public’ of Christmas holidaymakers has two choices to rationalise this sorry state of affairs. Choice one. God (or Father Christmas, if you prefer) does exist, is presumably unionised, and had voted in favour of strike action at BA. He is now quite pissed off by the High Court injunction, and rightly so. Choice two. Those who manage our (mostly privatised) public and private transport are inept and incapable of dealing with a largely expected, and after all hardly Siberian-style, drop in temperatures. They have – once more - willingly chosen to sacrifice reliability of service (and our Christmas holidays) on the altar of shareholders’ profit or cost cutting (a necessary evil for public authorities, now that they’ve bailed out bankers for the umpteenth time). Incidentally, these are the same shareholders asking for those pay cuts in BA that Unite workers were trying to oppose, before the High Court last week took away from them their last bargaining chip. The same shareholders that own BAA, the private airport operator owning or managing most of the airports you’d have flown from, had they only bought enough de-icing machines to deal with these three days of (hardly freak) cold weather. The same shareholders (whether private or public/private) that ultimately own and control the Eurostar carriage you are stuck in, or you should have travelled on…

There is hardly any doubt that the time has come to question the competence, managerial style, and strategic choices of public and private transport management. And to do so a bit more consistently, i.e. also (and particularly) when their choices trigger public and private transport workers to take industrial action and spoil our travel arrangements, over Christmas or when we go about our daily business. Workers are very much at the sharp end of ‘privatisation’, ‘short term profiteering’, ‘competitive markets’ and the ‘Ryanair model of industrial relations’. But it turns out (surprise, surprise) the wider public is at the sharp end too. When they loose, sooner or later, we all lose.

Of course the law (i.e. Parliament) could do a lot to help public transport workers win the hearts and minds of the public. How about the introduction of a statutory immunity protecting workers and their unions from lawsuits and liabilities if they were to take industrial action in the form of a strike and a ‘fare-free day’? A good ‘free-ride’, courtesy of the union, hitting management where it hurts, and much to the immediate advantage of commuters. For those of you who are troubled by concepts such as ‘natural justice’ and such, this would still not be a ‘free meal’ for striking workers (who would still forfeit their wages, as they always do when they take strike action), and the unions would still have to declare action after duly consulting with the affected workforce, that would presumably refrain from such forms of strike, if they were to bankrupt their employer. Employers would face some extra costs, on top of the loss of profits they would face anyway because of the industrial action. Of course some employers may choose to retaliate with a lock-out, or to hire extra private ticket inspectors (perhaps from the temping agency round the corner) for those days, but then the public would know who to side with.

But the public’s attitude towards industrial action is only part of the problem here. After all, BA workers were served an injunction ordering them not to strike, because of a series of – frankly unacceptable – legal loopholes, and not because of the ‘damage’ that their strike would have caused to festive travellers. Balloting requirements must be relaxed, and formal errors in the balloting calculus must be subject to a ‘material impact’ tests. That is to say, mistakes should be taken into account by the judges of the Realm only if they had a material impact on the result of the dispute ballot, which was blatantly not the case this time around. But this is ultimately a minimalist and regressive agenda. Industrial action deserves to be treated for what it is, a ‘fundamental human right’ as suggested lately even by the European Court of Human rights (in a 2009 case called Enerji Yapi-yol Sen v. Turkey), and its exercise should only be subject to limitations that are necessary in a democratic society (as noted by Article 11(2) of the European Convention of Human Rights), and not to the whims of shareholders, management, or the expectations of some sectors of a capitalist society.

Happy Christmas to everyone, and let’s make sure we get our New Year resolutions right.