It's a Question of Character, Stupid!

The Philippine Star

Sunday, November 3, 1996

By The Way

Max V. Soliven

The spoiled brats of the Philippine Airlines Employees Association (PALEA) who selfishly staged a "wildcat" strike last Wednesday returned to work last night, but it was too late to undo the damage they inflicted.

Sure, the strikers damaged PAL considerably by forcing scores of flights — domestic and international — to be cancelled torpedoing what should have been a "holiday" peak-earning week for our financially miserable national flag carrier. But not even PAL's competitors were able to clap their hands with glee at their rival's suffering and discomfiture, since their own operations were impaired by their confusion and service crunches which resulted in mayhem at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport and Manila Domestic Airport.

But the real victims of the PALEA illegal walkout were the hundreds of thousands of commuters — and I don't mean the foreigners, whether tourists or businessmen, who were photographed slumped disconsolately at airline counters and baggage carousels. They've experienced terrible airline and airport strikes in their own countries, the latest in France and Italy only days and weeks ago. The hardest-hit were our fellow Filipinos, particularly the homecoming overseas workers from Hong Kong, Singapore and the Middle East, who found their eagerly-anticipated family reunions ruined and were cheated of their dream of returning for that most cherished of rituals, outside of Christmas — the opportunity to pray for their beloved dead at cemeteries and burial plots in their hometowns all over our archipelago.

You can't move the clock either forward or backwards. The PALEA strike, maliciously timed to create maximum havoc on the declared "enemy", namely the airline management, and strike fear into the hearts of no less than the President himself and his Cabinet, boomed anger on its cynical organizers.

What about the students, local laborers and workers, and everyday Filipinos, who had been rushing home to honor their dead in the annual Todos los Santos and All Souls' Day gatherings which are so traditionally Filipino (a mirror image of the same observances held all over Catholic Spain and Latin America)? They found themselves piteously stranded at various airports, their flights junked, airport movement paralyzed, even their luggage lost somewhere in limbo. It was a time of heartbreak and frustration which earned the PALEA hardliners resentment, condemnation and a harvest of bitterness throughout the nation — rather than the "sympathy" they foolishly believed would be attracted.

Truly, as the saying goes, those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

***

The President, who tried to lean over backwards to appease the PAL unionists when they first threatened to strike, must now realize that it is his administration that is at risk, and his brand of leadership which is in crisis. Even if there were no APEC gathering to be sabotaged — as there is — he would still have to confront the troublemakers bravely and uncompromisingly on the issue.

What's the sordid squabble all about? More money and benefits. The PALEA, and, if the other two PAL unions join in the battle, the rest of the airlines employees, are trying to squeeze more brood out of a dry turnip. During the decades when the government ran and controlled PAL, the airline's fortunes and reputation collapsed entirely. Let's face that fact as a postulate for future action.

When Taipan Lucio Tan made the mistake of being "convinced" by others to buy into PAL when its false "privatization" move was announced, he didn't realize that he was being sucked into a vortex. Not only did he find the billions of pesos he originally invested misspent by the government administrators who were fighting a rear-guard battle to retain control of PAL, but poor Tan had to struggle with all his might to achieve the management status he thought his immense investment had bought him. After a long, hard conflict of attrition which would have worn a lesser man down, Tan, exhausted (but he thought "triumphant"), finally achieved control of PAL only 18 months ago. He discovered that he had been handed a can of worms — a clutch of aggressive, leftist-influenced, utterly spoiled children, their bellies and egos bloated with the government perks lined up for them by their political patrons, who, after all, were spending money which didn't belong to them — in a rotten airline subsidized, despairingly, by the Filipino taxpayers.

And now, with Tan on the hook, the PALEA is demanding both the sun and the moon — including one-day menstrual leave (Would you believe?) —from a bankrupt airline whose only hope of survival is to refleet at exorbitant cost ($4 billion for 36 new jet aircraft), or otherwise go belly-up. That's the situation, and there's no fudging it.

* * *

What can we do with a shitty airline operated by thousands of dopes who are determined to foul their own nest? Throw up our hands in despair and indignation, as Filipinos, and walk away, leaving our national flag carrier (on whose aircraft sides is painted the name "PHILIPPINES" and on whose airplane rudders are embossed the colors of our flag) to expire and be thrown into the junkyard? National honor requires us to save the national airline. But how can we accomplish that, if many of PAL's own 14,000 employees are determined to crash it?

The arrogant PALEA strike leaders, egged on by their radical leftwing advisers and lawyers, are bragging that an alliance of 1,400 unions, including those of the Manila Electric Company (Meralco), the Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company (PLDT), and other "fat cat" corporations, will walk out to support them. Sanamagan! Along with the PAL employees, the Meralco and PLDT workers are among the highest-paid in our entire country. They're not the unwashed and the dispossessed. They're a bunch of petits bourgeoise fulminating revolutionary buzzwords, anti-capitalist and' anti-"imperialist" slogans spoon-fed to them by the agitators in their midst, while enjoying benefits denied 99 percent of the nation's workforce.

If you ask me, it's a conspiracy. And the target? Tan may be the immediate "monster" they are claiming to assail, a convenient hate-figure and racial "bogeyman" since they can tar him on those placards at the picket line as an "Intsik". But even that rich Taipan — poorer by many billions of pesos since he assumed the thankless task of trying to resuscitate a dying airline — is only the patsy. The target is FVR and the stability of our entire republic.

Haven't you noticed? Many of our unions in land, sea, and air transportation, as well as in banking and some major industries, are in the hands of leftists, the new polite term for "former" communists. I am beginning to suspect that the word "former" is only a kind of window-dressing. The struggle continues, under a different label.

If the President doesn't act firmly and courageously now, he'll find himself adrift in a sunless sea, without a life vest or a compass.

I repeat: He is the target.