PAL Offers P1,000 Wage Hike

Today
November 7, 1996
By Richard Arboleda
Reporter

PHILIPPINE Airlines (PAL) offered a P1,000 increase in the monthly salaries of its 9,000 ground workers over the next four years and 200 shares of stock at P5 a share.

The management's offer on Tuesday night was a counter proposal to the demand by the PAL Employees' Association for a P5,000-pay increase for each ground worker from 1995 to 1997.

The negotiation was part of the agreement reached by both sides after the employees called a three-day strike to force the management to go to the bargaining table.

In its counterproposal, the management offered the ground workers a P100 increase in each worker's monthly salary this year, P200 next year, P300 in 1998 and P400 in 1999.

The salary increase was besides the 200 shares of stock worth P1,000 for each ground worker.

The workers went on strike last week when PAL officials refused to negotiate with the union after their collective bargaining agreement expired on September 30 last year.

The ground workers were joined by the flight stewards and stewardesses in last week's strike. The flight attendants' union has separate demands.

The management had refused to grant any salary raise until the year 2000, because it said the company had been losing and needed money to invest in a $4-billion refleeting program.

Besides its salary-increase proposal, the management also offered to study the workers' demand to revise its computation for overtime, holiday and premium payments.

In the 1989 collective bargaining agreement, the daily pay rates used to compute the overtime and holiday pays should be the yearly income of the worker divided by the number of working days in a year.

The management changed the computation by dividing a worker's yearly income by 365, the number of days in a year.