You know things like this really, really annoy me. Here is the leader of a party which can trace its history back to the rising union movement, and set out to represent the working man in government.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Party_(UK)

This week, Lord Adonis and Brown have both spoken out against Unite’s BA Action.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8567409.stm

At one point in our history, and not too long ago either, Labour would have been more supportive of its trade union supporters, and would be leaning on BA to see the error if its ways. However, the last few days have shown that this is not going to happen. It seems that right now, Labour is not interested in the working people of this country, and are happy to see them trodden underfoot by their employers.

They haven't been interested in the working man for a decade now. They take the union membership for granted. If they voted en masse to support the greens or LibDems or even the BNP, then Labour would realise that they screwed up.

"Labour is not interested in the working people of this country, and are happy to see them trodden underfoot by their employees."

Shouldn't that be "employers"?

Indeed. There has been a definite shift in politics to the right, with the Labour party now occupying a lot of the patch that Thatcher occupied in the 1980s.

The other observation is that now it seems almost unacceptable for people who work to complain about their conditions, and any action they do take is met with little support from the media, government or even the public. It seems that the social responsibility and even ethics of buying in the product of another’s labour is lost and forgotten. We (as a society) are quite happy to complain and take up economic arms against other countries who have such cavalier attitudes towards their workforces, yet when our own businesses take equally unpleasant policies to “modernise” it is somehow wrong to support those people who are directly affected.

People won’t be wailing in the streets when Kraft eventually shut the Cadbury’s factories in this country and move them to Poland. Yes, we’ll have a few members of the dwindling workforce protesting, but what we won’t have is a mass boycott of the product. However, we will gleefully complain about Primark’s alleged use of indentured child labour over seas, or Apple’s supposed abusive factories in China to name but two of the recent hot potatoes.

For soem reason, taking direct action in this country has become wrong - not because there is a better, more effective way to protest, but because we have become so selfish that we can not think any further than our own petty inconvenience.

As you can guess, today I am feeling “militant”.

dogbert10 - yes it should. Silly typo. I’ll correct it.

They stopped caring after Tony Blair was elected

Having said that they do have an issue in biting the hand that feeds it – The Union in question is one of the biggest donator to the labour party and with an election due soon I would if I was them say “support us or lose all funding”

The other issue is that the BA staff (from the press reports) don’t have much of a leg to stand on. They get paid more than any other airline and their planes have more staff than any other airline on each flight

The unions are partly responsible for their own demise over the last thirty years. They have defended the indefensible, and incompetent. If they had been more realistic about quality of workers then maybe they would not have had the problems with British Leyland.

Jesus wept. British Leyland? Have you been living in a cave for the last 30 years?

I picked BL as an example of egregious union ineptitude. There are probably plenty of modern examples.