‘British Airways Spied on Own Staff’

LONDON (Independent) -- British Airways paid £1m to hush up the details of a spying operation in which the phones and emails of its own cabin staff were allegedly improperly accessed during a bitter dispute with Britain’s largest union.

Date: 28 February 2015 - 21:39

News ID: ۱۱۵۱۵

The payment was made to stop the union, Unite, suing BA over the operation by specialist investigators based at Heathrow. Unite claimed the private communications of 10 BA staff, some of whom were also union officials, were accessed during a period in 2011 when the airline faced renewed strike action.
The decision to deploy the airline’s in-house investigators, many of them former Scotland Yard and security services personnel, was taken at the highest level within BA, according to information given to The Independent. The use of effective espionage against members of a major UK union, by a flagship UK company worth close to £12bn, raises new questions about the scale of use of private investigators inside Britain’s largest companies.
The £1m payment by BA, designed to brush potentially damaging disclosures about its activities under the carpet, echoes the £1m that Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers paid to settle the first legal cases relating to its voicemail interceptions, including the claim of Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association.
When Unite discovered the communications of its representatives at BA had been accessed, it hired the lawyer Daniel Taylor to begin legal action and represent cabin staff who had been targeted.
BA, now part of International Airlines Group (IAG), maintained that as it owned the computers and mobile phones used by many of its staff, it had been acting entirely within the law when it took the decision to "monitor” communications of some staff.
Some of the details acquired by the BA investigators were described to The Independent as "highly personal” and having little to do with the central issues being discussed.
Although Daniel Taylor is understood to have brought the claims close to an out-of-court settlement, his firm, Taylor Hampton, was dismissed by Unite, which itself handled the final stages of the negotiations with BA in late 2011. The final sum paid to the union, according to legal sources inside Unite, was about £1m.
Taylor subsequently took the unusual step of suing his former client over unpaid fees. In documents lodged at the High Court’s Queen’s Bench Division and acquired by The Independent, Taylor claimed he was owed £180,927 by Unite on "behalf of certain of its members”. Invoices detailed in the claim are understood to relate to cabin staff whose communications were accessed in the first half of 2011.
Had Taylor Hampton’s dispute with Unite gone to court, it would have led to the full story being made public of BA investigators accessing emails and phone messages. Given that this was when the News International phone-hacking scandal was at its height, it is likely that BA would have felt especially anxious to avoid headlines linking it to communications interceptions of any kind – even though there was no suggestion of criminality on BA’s part.
Taylor Hampton and Unite were contacted by The Independent. The union would say only that it had dealt with Taylor Hampton over a "variety of matters”, and that the subsequent dispute over "justifiable fees” had been resolved. Unofficially, union sources said they were bound by a confidentiality agreement.
Taylor said he had taken the action against Unite with "a great deal of regret” but was prevented by a similar confidentiality agreement from discussing further details.
The Independent gave BA the full details of Unite’s legal claim, how investigators had accessed emails and phones, the £1m settlement, descriptions of its investigations unit at Heathrow – set up ostensibly to improve passenger safety and security – and Taylor’s intended legal action.
In January 2011 BA cabin crew voted in favor of fresh strikes that were part of an ongoing dispute that went back to 2009. BA had gone to the courts to prevent a strike, and was successful in halting a planned strike because of flawed ballot procedures.
But in March 2010, after talks again collapsed, a three-day walkout took place amid threats of a further 20-day strike. BA responded by telling cabin staff that if they took part in the action they would lose valued travel perks.
Elements of that disagreement lasted throughout 2010 and into 2011.