Union considers BA dispute offer

。 11 May 2011 Last updated at 21:11 ET  The bitter dispute between the Unite union and British Airways has been continuing since 2009 Union members are meeting later to consider an offer which could end the long-running dispute between British Airways and some cabin crew.

The BBC has learned Unite union leaders are said to be "content" with what has been negotiated during talks with BA.

If those at the Heathrow meeting back the offer, a formal ballot of union members could be held within weeks.

This dispute began in 2009 over cost cutting but became bogged down over the loss of travel perks to striking staff.

Staffing levels

It has resulted in travel chaos for hundreds of thousands of passengers with the bill for the disruption caused to BA estimated to be ￡150m.

Continue reading the main story John Moylan Industry correspondent, BBC News

This has been one of the most bitter and prolonged industrial disputes of recent years.

It involved four strike ballots, led to 22 days of strike action and disrupted the travel plans of hundreds of thousands of passengers. It cost BA about ￡150m.

But a change of personnel at the top of both BA and the Unite union gave fresh impetus to resolving the row. Talks got under way in March, away from the glare of publicity.

The new deal will cover disciplinary action that some staff suffered during the strike and the issue of the removal of travel perks to those that went on strike.

It should also lift the threat of any further disruption to BA flights this summer.

However, after 22 days of strikes over the past 18 months, hopes have been raised that an end to the row is in sight.

Negotiations between the two sides resumed in March, when cabin crew voted in favour of a further round of industrial action, and have been going on for weeks.

The union held back from announcing strike dates pending the talks.

A spokesman for the British Airlines Stewards and Stewardesses Association - a branch of Unite - confirmed that "talks have now concluded to the satisfaction of both parties".

Unite general secretary Len McCluskey, who has held talks with BA chief executive Keith Williams, will address a mass meeting of union members and the union leadership is expected to recommend they accept the offer.

If they do, a formal ballot will be held, with the result expected in July. This raises the prospect of BA flights being free from disruption through summer.

The dispute started in November 2009 as a row about staffing levels on some long-haul flights. BA reduced the number of cabin crew on long-haul flights from 15 to 14 and introduced a two-year pay freeze from 2010.

Unite said this would hit passenger service and affect the earnings and career prospects of cabin crew.

But the union's demands shifted to the reinstatement of some workers sacked during industrial action and the decision, affecting about 7,000 Unite members, to take away travel perks from striking staff.

Leadership changes

Progress is thought to have been made on those two issues, which were the main sticking points, and reports suggest the proposed deal would also cover union representation and pay.

Former British Airways chief executive Willie Walsh became the focus of the anger of many union members during the dispute.

Mr Walsh has since moved on to head the company formed by the merger of BA and the Spanish carrier Iberia, International Airlines Group, and was succeeded by Mr Williams.

Mr McCluskey was elected in Novemebr 2010 to succeed former joint general secretaries Tony Woodley and Derek Simpson.

Japan Considers Tightening Access Around Nuclear Plant

The national government is reviewing with local governments the possibility of establishing a “caution zone” around the power plant with a radius of 12 miles said Yukio Edano, the chief secretary of Japan’s cabinet. Such a zone would be legally enforceable, in contrast with the current evacuation, which is technically voluntary.

As most radiation releases from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station have been stopped, some families have been re-entering the area in recent days to remove belongings and some journalists have been exploring it. Dozens of families never left after the initial evacuation was ordered in stages nearly six weeks ago, following an earthquake and tsunami on March 11.

Growing activity in the evacuation area has prompted concern among evacuees that their homes may be robbed while they are away. Nuclear power experts have been debating whether the continued movement of people, livestock and vehicles in the area will make it harder to decontaminate after the nuclear power plant has been fully stabilized.

Noriyuki Shikata, a senior government spokesman, said on Tuesday that the government did not have the legal authority to prevent people from entering and leaving the evacuation zone, nor the legal authority to evict those who stayed behind. Media reports have suggested that as many as 200 households are still occupied in the zone, mainly elderly people who refuse to live at evacuation centers in gymnasiums or farmers who refuse to abandon their livestock.

Plans for a caution zone were reported by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, which said that the government also intended to allow residents to make brief trips into the zone to recover essentials from their homes.

The Sankei Shimbun newspaper reported on its Web site on Wednesday morning that residents of Minami-Soma city, which lies partly inside the northern side of the evacuation zone, were being given fliers warning that a legally enforceable caution zone could be created.

A spokesman for the Fukushima Prefecture police, whose jurisdiction encompasses the evacuation zone, said that the police have done spot checks on 3,378 addresses in the area during the past three weeks and found people at 63 sites; those people were asked to leave. According to the Japanese cabinet, there were 78,200 residents of the area inside the 12-mile radius before the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident.

Mr. Edano, the second-ranking government official in Japan, said at a follow-up news conference on Wednesday afternoon that Prime Minister Naoto Kan would travel on Thursday to Fukushima to meet the prefecture’s governor and visit evacuation centers in two cities in the prefecture. Mr. Edano declined to predict whether a caution zone would be imposed.

Decontamination of a large area after a nuclear accident consists of very carefully mapping the “hot spots” where wind and rain may have concentrated radioactive fallout. Contaminated objects are then sent to a specially lined landfill; even the dirt may have to be dug up if contamination is high enough.

Michael Friedlander, a former nuclear power plant operator in the United States and nuclear emergency specialist who now lives in Hong Kong, said in interviews last week and this week that it was very important to prevent unnecessary activity in the evacuation zone. He contended car tires and other movement could result in smearing around the radioactive dust from the invisible hot spots, making it necessary to decontaminate other areas as well or leaving other areas with low levels of contamination.

But Michael Corradini, the chairman of engineering physics at the University of Wisconsin, said that with power crews already setting up electricity transmission lines across the evacuation zone to the damaged power plant, and with heavy repair equipment being brought in as well to the power plant, the movement of private individuals and their vehicles would probably not have much additional effect in spreading out the hot spots.

Another 62,400 people lived between 12 and 19 miles from the power plant. People living inside the larger area were initially told to stay indoors, but have since been asked to leave voluntarily, along with residents of five other communities outside the zone that also received some radioactive fallout because of wind and rain patterns. The cabinet has not released an estimate for the population of the other five communities.

After the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986, the former Soviet Union established a more stringently enforced exclusion zone with an initial radius of about 19 miles. The exact boundaries of the zone were later adjusted to reflect actual patterns of fallout. Wind and rain had pushed particularly heavy fallout to the north of the reactor that caught fire.

Japan has been fortunate in that weather patterns appear to have pushed much of the radiation straight east and out to sea, with the exception of one plume that fell on land to the northwest of the reactor.

Many of the wind gauges and other meteorological equipment close to the site were destroyed by the tsunami and earthquake. Masanori Shinano, a technical counselor at Japan’s Nuclear Safety Commission, said last week that the government had needed to estimate wind direction to calculate the total radiation released by the accident. The agency looked at weather forecasts for those days around the Fukushima area, which are generated from computer models using other weather stations, and concluded from the forecasts that the wind was mainly blowing out to sea during the days of the greatest release of airborne radioactive material.

The commission, a panel of independent experts, estimates that the total radiation released by the Fukushima accident was one-sixth of that at Chernobyl. Japan’s Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, which has a history of being close to the nuclear industry, estimates that the total release was a tenth of Chernobyl’s.

Ken Ijichi, Moshe Komata and Kantaro Suzuki contributed reporting.

 

Japan Considers Clampdown on Returnees to Nuclear Zone

 VOA News ?April 20, 2011

Japanese officials say they are considering steps to legally enforce an exclusion zone within 20 kilometers of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant.

More than 60,000 people were evacuated from the zone shortly after the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that knocked out cooling systems at the plant. But Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said Wednesday that some residents and others have been venturing back in spite of a government advisory to stay away.

Edano said the government is talking to local officials about ways to legally enforce the restriction. Press reports said Prime Minister Naoto Kan will likely announce the measures during a visit to the region on Thursday and that the restrictions could go into effect as early as this week.

At the plant, engineers have been working since Tuesday to pump more than 10,000 tons of highly radioactive water out of the basement and utility tunnel at one of the six reactors. Officials said water levels in the tunnel -- which had been rising about two centimeters a day -- were down about one centimeter Wednesday morning.

A French company, Areva, has contracted to build a facility at the plant capable of decontaminating 50 tons per hour of water so it can be recycled to keep the plant's nuclear fuel rods from overheating. Officials hope to have the facility in operation by the beginning of June.

Officials with the Tokyo Electric Power Company, the plant's operators, released the first photographs from inside two of the badly damaged reactor buildings on Wednesday. The pictures were taken by remote-controlled robots sent in to measure radiation levels to determine whether humans can safely go back inside.

Japan's NHK Television said the robots' access to one of the buildings was hampered by debris. At another building, the interior was so steamy that the camera lens immediately fogged up.

The Kyodo news agency quoted a doctor who has examined some of the men struggling to stabilize the plant saying the men are at risk of depression or death from overwork. The doctor said the workers, some of whom lost their own family members in the tsunami, are pushing themselves out of a sense of moral responsibility.

Despite the problems, an official at the International Atomic Energy Agency said Tuesday in Vienna that radiation levels leaking from the plant are coming down steadily. IAEA expert Denis Flory said that unless something unexpected happens, he does not expect total radiation leaking into the environment to increase much beyond current levels.

The Japanese government has for the first time set radiation safety levels for school playgrounds in the prefecture surrounding the plant. It said normal playground activities should be allowable if radiation remains at current levels.

National police said late Tuesday that the confirmed death toll in the earthquake and tsunami has now topped 14,000, with more than 13,600 others still missing. It said more than 90 percent of the victims recovered so far died from drowning, and that more than 65 percent of them were over age 60.