British Airways (BA) cabin crew entered the second day of a four-day strike yesterday, in a dispute that has become increasingly political.
Just weeks before an election expected on May 6, opposition Conservative leader David Cameron used the strike to attack Prime Minister Gordon Brown, whose Labour party receives much of its funding from Unite.
Cameron told the BBC yesterday that Brown had displayed "weakness" in his response to the BA dispute and threatened action by railway workers, saying this was "partly because he's hocked to the unions".
"The unions have scented weakness in the government and that's one of the reasons why we're seeing quite so many strikes," he added.
Brown hit back in a separate BBC interview, saying there had been "far greater industrial peace" in the past 13 years of the Labour government than there had been in the previous 18 years of Conservative rule.