i can see where your coming from Charlie, most jobs (especially that of catering or working as a sales assistant etc…) the employees have very little power.

However, i think it would be unfair to compare your job to that of a baggage handler, or any poor sod who has the unfortunate responsibility of working in an airport!

The people who are striking are those who work for the two budget airlines; Ryanair and easyjet. they were offered a 3% pay rise (ridiculous) and were eventually forced into taking industrial action.

Pearce said: “These workers are doing one of the most vital jobs in the airport but are among the lowest paid.”

The union is asking for a 5% pay offer to keep pace with inflation, which i think is pretty fair.

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Ok I agree a 3% pay rise isn’t great but I, like thousands of other workers, are not getting a pay rise at all this year – 0%. I have a very responsible job managing a huge team of over forty people and oodles of clients and accounts. If I screw up, people further down the chain don’t get work and can’t pay their bills so it’s a big responsibility but because we supply the retail sector and the business hasn’t achieved it’s predicted growth, I can’t have a pay rise. I’d be chuffed with 3%. Difference is, I feel that sometimes you just have to play the long game and understand that if you force a business to give you more than it has budgeted for, you de-stabilise your job security and risk redundancy further down the line. You also anger your management making them less receptive to other requests like better working hours and may also threaten the very future of the company if it becomes too expensive to continue to trade. Sometimes perhaps, you have to accept something for the good of the whole rather than pushing for your own individual needs, then re-evaluate next year. If my salary doesn’t increase next year I might have to make tough decisions but also understand my own responsibility to make the company more profitable so that my boss can afford to pay me more. Charges to clients don’t go up every year and often come down, as with the current economic situation, which is the same for airlines, housing, and retail so if pay goes up and profits go down the business becomes unstable. I guess some people just seem too quick to strike especially when it’s the general public that really suffer and if that action costs the company a lot of money then jobs might be lost further down the line making it all seem a bit counter productive. I’m not saying strikes are always unjustified or that there isn’t a place for them, just that you have to see it from both sides and it always seems to be ordinary people who get the most affected by them, often the people who can’t or would never dream of striking! I just felt sorry for all those people and children who were so looking forward to their holiday and faced cancelations due to the strikes, I just felt like I had to stand up for them and for the workers of my own industry who seem to have so few rights.

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