AS WE GO to press we do not know whether the planned strike by British Airways ground staff and cabin crew will take place, although it seems increasingly likely.
Even if it does not, it has raised important issues for the whole of the labour movement.
BA, in trying to maintain its edge in the highly competitive world of air travel, is trying to drastically reduce its costs at the expense of its workers.
It wants to contract out catering (along with all over ground services, including engineering) and impose pay changes on flight staff.
In the old game of divide and rule, it has got the agreement of the small breakaway union representing some cabin crew to agree the changes, and is now saying it will negotiate with the TGWU over the catering sell off but not the cabin crew conditions.
On top of this it has been training managers and back-up staff to do ground staff jobs, and said it will bring in a scab workforce and sue individual strikers for up to £400 a day.
No-one seems quite sure whether all this is legal, but it is a clear indication of the strength and arrogance management feel after years of working class defeat, backed up by the most vicious antiBlair: lines up with bosses as bosses line up against unions union laws in Western Europe.
It also shows that all the delays built into the anti-union laws between a decision to ballot for action and the action itself are designed to allow management to make preparations for a dispute.
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It not only emphasises the need to demand that Blair reverses his refusal to scrap these laws, but shows up the problems of Labour's wooing of big business.
Bob Ayling, chief of BA, has been fêted by Tony Blair and is said to be a personal friend. So is Bill Morris, general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union, which organises BA staff!
Morris has been going out of his way to avoid a strike by resuming negotiations, no doubt hoping for a deal which would essentially give BA what it wants while offering a few sops to the workers.
Blair has been saying the standoff is nothing to do with the government. But it starkly shows that no government can be a friend both to big business and to its workforce, and how the anti-union laws, which are very much a government matter, back up one side against the other. Morris: last-minute negotiations to avoid clash with scab-herding chum