单项选择题

Text 3 Employees of the Taft Vale Railway Company in South Wales greased the tracks and cut telegraph wires during a bitter strike in 1900. The next year the House of Lords ruled that their union could be sued for damaging the company. The shock to the union movement inspired the Labour Party and a 1906 Trade Disputes Act, aimed at protecting strikers from such punishment through the courts. On May 18th in 2010, leaders of Unite, a trade union, invoked the spirit of Taff Vale after a court injunction stopped a threatened 20-day series of strikes by British Airways’ cabin crew, 90 percent of whom are Unite members. The judgment, which Unite called an "absolute disgrace", hung on a technicality: that the results of the strike ballot had not been relayed correctly to BA staff. The union immediately appealed, and on May 20th had the judgment overturned. So for BA the strike had only been slightly delayed. The court saga illustrates the unyielding antipathy in the dispute between Willie Walsh, BA’s punchy chief executive, and indignant cabin crew backed by a union that faces falling membership. It was triggered last year by BA’s plans to reduce crew numbers on long-haul flights from London’s Heathrow airport, but it is now mainly a war over the airline’s threats to deny discretionary free flights and other perks to those who strike. Most of the planned operational changes have been agreed upon, along with compromises. But the animosity is doing added damage to an airline already beset by negatives—from volcanic ash, to dwindling long-haul travel and looming tax increases. Meanwhile, the low-cost airlines Ryanair and easy Jet are snapping at its heels. The recession, and the way passenger taxes are graded by distance and standard of travel, have favoured their short-haul, no-frills model. More worrying for BA, however, is the trend away from conventional route networks based on big hubs to the ad-hoc linking of airports by the low-cost airlines. Landing slots at prime airports are expensive. New airline taxes being considered by Britain’s new government may be applied per plane rather than per passenger, favouring the fuller planes of the low-cost companies. In 2012, a European emissions-trading scheme is to replace national taxes: it will penalise longer flights and emptier planes. The future may indeed lie with the low-cost airlines, but they would be foolish to bet on uninterrupted growth. Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the founder of easyJet, resigned from its board on May 14th, criticising its plans to add 59 planes to a fleet of 189 against the twin uncertainties of volcanic ash and the euro crisis. However, with BA apparently floundering, perhaps this is the very time to grab market share.

It can be inferred from the last paragraph that（）

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