THE LIAISON COUNCIL

How the Liaison Council is appointed and operates.

This is how the Liaison Council is appointed. Firstly it advertises vacancies in Touchdown - the BA pensioners' quarterly newspaper. For some arcane reason vacancies are dedicated to specific geographical regions of the UK and Northern Ireland, but for our purpose that is of no consequence. Pensioners living in the designated area are invited to propose themselves for membership of the Liaison Council.

Then they are interviewed to determine their suitability by the present Council members. If they are deemed suitable they become members of the Liaison Council.

However, if it isn’t enough that they are vetted by a coterie of existing, like-minded Council members, they are also interviewed by a serving member of British Airways management. The role of this person hasn’t been explained but if it is not to ensure that the candidate is a compliant pensioner willing to support British Airways’ contentious pleas for a third runway etc and not a rabid critic of British Airways or, even a member of ABAP (which British Airways refuses to recognise), then no other purpose can be divined.

The Liaison Committee claims that selection by closed door interview, overseen by a British Airways gauleiter, means they are not appointed by British Airways and that it is unfair for anyone to refer to them as British Airways’ stooges. poodles etc. and to state that they are unelected. Whatever semantics they wish to apply the fact is that the Retired Staff Liaison Council is not elected in the same, open and transparent way that ABAP and other democratic organisations.

Apart from co-options to fill mid-term vacancies, the ABAP system requires candidates from anywhere in the UK and Northern Ireland to offer themselves for election to the Committee, and all paid-up members of ABAP vote secretly to determine which of the candidates has the most support. This system seems to be to have an element of fairness and transparency lacking in the Liaison Council’s own procedures.

As far as its operation is concerned when the new Staff Travel scheme was brought to the Liaison Council its members were required to concede to a Confidentiality Agreement forbidding them from discussing any aspect of the scheme with the people they were supposed to be representing.

This seems to an impartial view a strange way to pretend to be "in discussion" with the pensioners' representatives.