Sick Strike

Today

Saturday, November 2, 1996

TWO photographs should be juxtaposed with a third. Photographs of the long lines of vehicles clogging the roads leading to cemeteries in Manila, along with pictures of forlorn and frustrated air travelers stranded because Philippine Airlines employees chose this weekend to go on strike. The first photographs show the intensity of the Filipino commitment to honor their dead. The second reveals, beneath sad and tired faces, the depth of their frustration and grief.

Now juxtapose those two photographs with those of characters who caused their grief.

PAL employees might have staged their walkout, if they had any fortitude, during the week of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting. They would have merely embarrassed a parochially minded government. (Broad-minded and mature governments like that of France laugh off national strikes during international events. There was a transportation strike at the height of the bicentennial of the French Revolution, which President Corazon Aquino was invited to grace. The French officials laughed off the strike and the Parisians used it as an excuse to carouse until the morning. Only Mickey Mouse governments of nothing nations are embarrassed by these inescapable aspects of modem society.)

But this strike of the PAL employees—half of them totally redundant, all of them better paid than others and for doing a lot less work than most—affected not the government but the common people, in the moment of their greatest emotional vulnerability. All Souls' and All Saints' Days are times of special poignancy for Filipinos to remember those who loved them without conditions—parents and grandparents gone ahead.

What was the aim of the PAL strikers? Yesterday's front-page photograph showed these overfed and under-worked characters, with their fists raised in a Marxist salute. Did they want to punch the common man in the face? They just stabbed him in the heart. The only excuse for this tactless and tasteless action is that it was the idea of a dialectical materialist who doesn't believe in spirits.

What did the strikers have in mind? Push their victims to stage mass rallies in the strikers' behalf in front of the PAL headquarters? Few know where that is. PAL was plundered so thoroughly by its previous managements and its rank and file that the national carrier never built a head office. Why build something you can't take home with you, like caviar or champagne?

The PAL strikers are out for yet higher wages. Why don't they reflect on why PAL is broke? Besides government theft, PAL is at least 50 percent overstaffed—and these are usually the spare-parts thieves. But ask anyone to strike against himself.

The common people can do nothing about this strike, and Lucio Tan's business rivals, who sympathize with the strikers, have all flown to plush vacation places on their company planes.

All that the common people can do is despise the strikers for the unwarranted hurt the latter inflicted on them yesterday. It was the one special day for their dear departed, whom they yet felt did not deserve to be joined by the likes of the PAL employees who really deserved to join them.

As for the government, it let the strike go on and victimize the common people because, in its view, better the strike now than during the Apec summit. It probably struck a deal with the strikers to that effect.