The self-defeating myopia of British Airways employees and the mind-numbing ineptitude of BA management combined to produce a nightmare journey recently. I had flown flight BA 8 from Tokyo to London on Friday, July 18, landing at Heathrow's Terminal 4 around 5 p.m. I was due to catch another BA flight to Amman, Jordan, just after 9 p.m. Unbeknownst to us, check-in and baggage-handling staff had resorted to a wildcat strike without any advance warning at 4 p.m. in Terminal 1, which then spread to the other terminals.

The employees' grievance is unlikely to attract much sympathy. The company wants to introduce swipecards to monitor the exact time that staff arrive and leave through an electronic clocking system. Staff fear that this could lead to annualized hours and split shifts. So they walked out -- without warning, without a ballot -- in an informal or unofficial strike.

You would have thought that the manifold woes of all airlines over the past couple of years (9/11, severe acute respiratory syndrome, etc.) would have been imprinted on every airline industry worker's memory. BA, having lost £200 million ($324 million) in the year ended March 31, 2002, struggled back to a profit of £135 million last financial year. But by the end of June this year -- before the strikes -- BA is reported to have already lost £60 million to £70 million.