Security guards employed by Heathrow Airport Ltd have voted to intensify industrial action over pay, announcing rolling 24-hour strikes on almost every Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 24 July until the August bank-holiday weekend. Unite the Union says more than 2,000 officers working at all four terminals backed the action after rejecting the airport’s latest 5 % pay offer, which the union argues is well below inflation and lags behind pay rates at Gatwick and Stansted. The stoppages will coincide with the busiest weeks of the UK school holidays, when Heathrow typically handles 250,000 passengers a day. Although Heathrow insists contingency plans—redeploying managers with security clearances, reallocating passenger flows between terminals and opening extra e-Gates—kept disruption to under an hour during previous one-day strikes in June, airline trade group BAR UK warns that sustained weekend action poses a “material risk” to on-time performance, tight aircraft rotations and crew duty-time limits. Business-travel specialists say corporates should avoid departure targets within 90 minutes of meeting end-times, allow extra time for connecting flights and consider booking flexible fares that permit same-day re-routing via European hubs if security queues exceed two hours. Travel-management company CWT reports that large multinationals are already shifting short-haul meetings to Manchester, Amsterdam and Paris-CDG to protect schedules. Heathrow’s latest accounts show that each percentage point of base-pay increase adds £4 million to annual costs. Management argues that wage growth must be balanced against Civil Aviation Authority caps on airport charges. Unite counters that Heathrow’s 2025 operating profit of £1.6 billion leaves “ample headroom” for an above-inflation rise. If no agreement is reached, the dispute could become Heathrow’s most prolonged security walkout since 2013, testing the resilience of the airport’s newly expanded e-Gate network and its ability to maintain Service Level Agreements with airlines during the peak summer period.
Source: London Daily
