Mick Cash, the general secretary of the RMT rail union, said: "The news of this culture of the top brass jetting around in the lap of luxury comes on the very day that we begin balloting 16,000 NR staff for strike action over the threat to their job security and their standard of living.
The airline is embarking on another round of job cuts, generating anger from its biggest union, which is balloting its members on strike action.
So it is balloting 7,000 key workers employed by Network Rail, the state-created "company" that operates the signals and track.A strike there could stop most of the trains in Britain.
Unison, a health-service union, is balloting workers affected to strike against the transfer.
However, the areas where Sunni Arabs predominate, especially the region around Fallujah, west of Baghdad, may still be too insecure by late January for balloting to be held there.
Despite the government's big parliamentary majority, Deniz Baykal, the leader of the opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), managed to stop Mr Gul's election by dubiously claiming in the constitutional court that parliament lacked a quorum of 367 deputies in its first round of balloting.
His effort came to an end when the constitutional court upheld a claim by the CHP that the parliament lacked a quorum in a first round of balloting.
They are already balloting for a strike over changes to their pensions.
In the event, Mr Wulff eventually won the absolute majority that had eluded him in the first two rounds of balloting.
And Unison, the biggest public-sector union, is balloting the 500,000 health-care workers it represents on whether to reject their pay deal and call a strike as well.The NUT complains that teaching has become unattractive compared with other graduate jobs.
Instead, the party on October 24th is balloting its 87,000 members, many of them new to it Canadians sign up to their parties each year, and many are said to have done so just for this vote.
