The Unite union said on Thursday that a dispute affecting check-in staff at London Heathrow Airport has been “suspended” after the company made a new pay offer. Instead, staff will be voted on the sweetened pay deal. “We welcome the fact that BA has finally listened to the voice of its check-in staff. Unite has repeatedly warned that pay disputes at BA were inevitable unless the company took the legitimate grievances of our members seriously,” said Unite general secretary Sharon Graham. The GMB union, whose members were also due to strike, has agreed a deal with BA, according to a union official. Around 700 ticket-checking crew at Heathrow had voted to strike last month, with unions promising “serious disruption” to coincide with the summer rush to fly overseas. Unite said the pay offer from BA was “vastly improved” without disclosing further details. The union had called for wages to be restored to pre-pandemic levels, following a 10 per cent cut imposed by BA when the industry was shut down entirely by Covid-19 travel restrictions. The airline said it was “very pleased” with the result, which came a day after it announced plans to cut another 10,300 flights this summer due to staff shortages, bringing the total number of cancellations this year to around 30,000. BA was under extreme pressure to avoid a strike that could throw its businesses into chaos on one of the busiest travel weekends of the year as schools break up for the summer. But many other employers also recognize that they will have to make concessions on pay to avoid bitter industrial disputes, especially in a tight labor market where recruitment is difficult. Unite said separately on Thursday it had won an additional 4 per cent pay rise for more than 17,000 of NatWest bank’s lowest-paid staff, which will be rolled into basic pay rather than a one-off lump sum. It recently agreed a similar pay top-up at Barclays and a £1,000 bonus for Lloyds Banking Group staff. Meanwhile, a Bank of England survey published on Thursday showed that two-thirds of employers are finding it “much more difficult” than normal to recruit new staff, with average wage growth expected to remain above 5 per cent hundred in the next 12 months – a level that policymakers think is unsustainable. Separately, a survey published on Friday by the Recruitment & Employment Confederation, the UK’s professional body for recruitment, showed that employers continued to report deteriorating candidate availability and sharp increases in starting salaries, even as the frenetic pace of recruitment it had slowed down a bit. While private sector employers are showing flexibility, the current political turmoil could make the wage gaps developing in the public and quasi-public sectors intractable. Mick Lynch, general secretary of rail union RMT, said Boris Johnson’s resignation raised the prospect of “months of chaos at the heart of government, which could seriously undermine the prospect of a settlement of the national rail dispute”. On Thursday 2,000 RMT members at Govia Thameslink Railway voted to join the industry-wide strikes, making the rail operator the 14th to face industrial action in a dispute over pay, conditions and job security. Nadhim Zahawi, the new chancellor, has given no firm signal on whether he might be willing to fund more generous wage settlements for public sector workers than the 2-3 percent offer currently embedded in the funding plans of departments.
