Welcome to the latest Shopper Rant opinion column. Read the argument for striking workers who are damaging the country to be sacked, then join the debate by adding your comments.

FIRST it was the planes. The once-great British Airways brought to its knees by a union which has a grasp on reality more slender than Victoria Beckham’s thighs.

Now it looks as if the trains are to follow suit, as dishevelled congregations of donkey-jacketed maintenance men prepare to down tools and swap anti-management rhetoric round flaming, track-side braziers.

Withdrawal of labour is a prehistoric, childlike action in situations where workers come into conflict with management. Also, no good ever comes of it. When was the last successful strike?

While managers struggle to balance budgets and maintain services, unions invariably retreat to the lowest common denominator at the earliest possible opportunity.

Public service unions relish in disrupting the plans of the public – postal workers, firefighters, cabin crews, civil servants and now railway workers – like children with attention deficit disorder, they love drawing the spotlight on themselves, always blaming someone else when the public rightly rise up in anger at the nightmares the unions’ actions have caused.

“We regret taking this action but have been forced into it by the intractable management at (insert name of billions-in-debt company)”, is usually what they come out with. But they don’t regret it. The love flexing their muscles.

This Is Local London: BA strike

The BA strike is particularly galling. BA pays its cabin crews more than any other mainstream airline in the world and its planes have more cabin staff than any other airline flying out of the UK.

Between March 2008 and March 2009, BA lost £400m, more than £1m every single day. The past 12 months can’t have been much better. The union’s response is to compound the losses even further by walking out.

What sort of sense does that make? Not only is the action quintessentially pointless – BA will not budge and both sides seem to be getting further and further entrenched – but it actually throws millions of BA pounds straight down the toilet.

Protecting the rights of your workers is one thing. Alienating the entire British public (who’s going to risk flying with BA now?) and bringing your already struggling employers closer to the brink is quite another.

It’s obvious to anyone sensible that the people participating in the BA strike, and indeed any strike threatening this country’s rail service, should be sacked.

These days if you swear in an internal email you’re out from behind your desk quicker than Usain Bolt after four cans of Red Bull.

But threaten the company which was good enough to offer you a way of paying your mortgage with bankruptcy, stop small children getting to Disneyland, demolish long-standing holiday plans and compound the problems of already struggling businesses, all in the name of slightly improving your own personal lot, and they can’t touch you.

No-one could argue that workers do not deserve protection. But watching the unions revel in holding the nation to ransom is intolerably obscene.

This column is produced by an independent writer and in no way reflects the official position of News Shopper or its parent company.

What do you think? Do you support the BA strike? Will you support railway workers if they too go out on strike? Should there be tougher laws to prevent industrial action causing widespread disruption to the country? Should employers be allowed to sack workers who go on strike? Add your comments below.

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