March 20th - Heathrow and Passport Office strikes
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 20 March 2023
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Security officers at Heathrow and Passport Office staff are both taking industrial action in pursuit of pay claims. My message: don’t panic.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Monday the 20th of March and I'm Simon Calder. |
| 0:08.6 | Well, if you have been looking at the news affecting travel over the weekend, you will know that there's a lot of |
| 0:16.6 | industrial action around. So I'm bringing you a kind of strike special, but my message is |
| 0:23.1 | don't panic. Let me begin with the strike that was announced late on Friday by the Unite Union. |
| 0:30.6 | This is all about security officers at Heathrow, specifically Heathrow Terminal 5. No other terminal is affected. |
| 0:42.4 | They plan to walk out from the 31st of March to the 9th of April in a move clearly aimed at the big getaway for Easter holidays. |
| 0:53.6 | Now, the airport says we have contingency plans in place and at the |
| 0:59.8 | moment there should be no effect on services. There are a lot of people have been in touch saying help I'm |
| 1:05.6 | flying out of Heathrow but unless you are flying from Terminal 5 which means that you will be on board British Airways, |
| 1:13.2 | and actually not all BA flights have affected, last time I flew on BA, I was going from Terminal 3. |
| 1:19.6 | And if you're going from any other airport, any other terminal at Heathrow, you will not be affected. |
| 1:25.6 | I can imagine that over the weekend there have been some quite |
| 1:29.2 | robust discussions between the employers of the security staff and British Airways about |
| 1:37.4 | what is going to happen because any strike is going to have a deterrent effect on bookings in aviation. |
| 1:44.1 | That always happens. And I think |
| 1:48.5 | there is a very good chance that this strike will be called off. My understanding is that there |
| 1:55.1 | was a vote for 11 different cohorts of staff at Heathrow and only two of them working at Terminal 5 voted to strike. |
| 2:03.8 | So I think support is not as strong as it might be for the strike and so therefore probably the airport and the security company do not need to go too far. |
| 2:15.1 | Had I got a flight booked from Heathrow Terminal 5 on those dates |
| 2:21.6 | 31st of March to the 9th of April, I would not be too worried about it. What I am concerned about |
| 2:28.7 | is the strike announced by the members of the PCS union, more than a thousand of them, working for |
| 2:37.2 | passport offices in England, Wales and Scotland. They will be going on strike for about |
... |
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