Unions in Denmark, Sweden and Norway are going to take action in support of the BA strike:
ITF General Secretary David Cockroft said: “BA is a world organisation and conflict within it has world repercussions. Our member unions have watched the failure of negotiations between management and union and they have been unanimous in recognising the risk of a downward spiral across the aviation sector and the potential for damage to the company, its image, passengers and workers that failure represents.”
He continued, “We and our members intend to resist what has come to look very much like an attempt to break the union, and resist the drop in standards across the industry – probably starting in Spain after any BA/Iberia tie-up – that it would usher in if allowed to happen.â€
Having the strike spread outside of the UK will do a lot to make BA hurt. One of the ways BA has been able to limit damages so far is because it partners with other airlines and can depend on their crews for those flights. If union involvement from outside the UK can stop this, BA will have a lot less flights departing as planned. See the below video for a handy explanation.
It’s good to see that unions in other countries recognise the danger of letting BA win and are prepared to make sacrifises to stop them. Unions have long realised that with globalised capital, labour needs to be globalised as well, but it has been much harder to put in practise. One of the few succesful multinational union campaigns I can think off of the top of my head is that of the harbour workers fighting the deregulation of European ports — hopefully the BA campaign will be another one.