A Strike vs. PALEA

The Visayan Daily Star

Monday, November 4, 1996

Editorial

All's well that ends well?

Not in the case of the strike at Philippine Airlines last week. While the PAL Employees' Association, which had launched the crippling strike, has already come to terms with management, we are afraid it has dented its image badly in the public mind.

How could they have done it at a time when thousands of people were supposed to take PAL flights to observe a time-honored Filipino tradition? PALEA can be sure that the thousands who had been stranded by its ill-timed strike can be multiplied several times over with their families who had waited in vain for their arrival.

Striking workers usually have public sympathy on their side — but not in this case when they needlessly threw a monkey wrench on such an important occasion that only underscored their selfishness and opportunism. And certainly not when, as everybody knows, the company they work for is hobbling from financial problems and the imminent threat of competition. If the PAL employees can not accept their present working conditions, why don't they transfer to the other airlines? On second thought, perhaps they should stay where they are; they might infect the new airlines with the hot air many of them are notorious for.

Of course we must congratulate the local PAL office for continuing with their work and not joining the strike. They must have seen the bad timing, and the fact that it was a strike that could only blow up in their faces, as it already has.

PAL operations are expected to return to normal by now. We hope that the relations between management and the union have also been threshed out and we do not get another strike that will punish their clients as thoughtlessly and as cruelly as the one they staged last week.