In 2020, British Airways issued redundancy notices to virtually all of its 42,000 employees, ultimately cutting 10,000 jobs. The move was framed as pandemic survival. In practice, it operated as a mass renegotiation of employment terms under duress — a fire-and-rehire strategy that Unite called out in parliamentary testimony and MPs labeled a "national disgrace." The airline told its longest-serving cabin crew to accept a 20% basic pay cut to stay. Actual salary reductions ranged from 15% to 35%. Tess De Mello, a cabin crew member with 30 years of service, became one of the casualties. When she asked for clarification of her exact rehire salary and requested time to consider — while explicitly stating she wanted to remain — BA treated her response as a decision to leave, according to court documents. The mechanism is instructive: frame a query as a refusal, then close the door. De Mello and a colleague lost their unfair dismissal claim before Judge Laurie Anstis at a Reading employment tribunal in 2024 and are now appealing. The second legal front is potentially more consequential. De Mello and her colleague argue they were underpaid holiday entitlement as part-time workers. Cabin crew on part-time contracts cannot realistically work shorter days — the nature of the job requires blocks of full days on, followed by blocks off. Their lawyers classify this as "part-year" work, akin to teachers, and cite a 2022 Supreme Court ruling that part-year workers under permanent contracts are not required to have their leave prorated to match full-time workers. If this argument succeeds, the ramifications extend well beyond BA. Unite notes that block shift patterns are standard across the aviation industry. A favorable ruling would open the door to similar claims from cabin crew at multiple airlines, with potentially enormous back-pay liabilities. BA dismisses the claims as "without merit," pointing to the 2025 tribunal decision that found its pandemic actions "non-discriminatory and fair." The personal dimension is worth noting because it illustrates the asymmetry of these disputes. De Mello describes profound shame — not at having done anything wrong, but at the social signal her dismissal sent to colleagues. She feared they would assume poor performance. That psychological cost is invisible in corporate balance sheets but real in the lives of workers who built identities around their roles for decades. BA's defense rests on the existential framing: these steps were taken to "avoid the collapse of the business and loss of thousands of jobs during the Covid-19 pandemic." That framing did enough to win at tribunal. But the holiday pay claim operates on different legal terrain — it doesn't contest the pandemic rationale but rather the structural underpayment baked into how aviation treats part-time shift workers regardless of crisis. The underlying pattern is familiar: a crisis provides cover for permanent restructuring of labor terms, while legal costs and years of litigation impose asymmetric burdens on the individuals challenging those terms. Five years after the pandemic firings, De Mello is still in court. BA has a legal department. She has a case number.
