The Philippine Star
Friday, November 1, 1996
By The Way
By MAX V. SOLIVEN
The present illegal "wildcat" strike by ground service personnel of Philippine Airlines is a dress rehearsal for a bigger strike which would paralyze air services to and from the country—that's what "crisis" analysts say.
Already, the troublemakers from the Philippine Airlines Employees’ Association (PALEA) who walked out last Wednesday night have crippled domestic and international flight schedules. Can you imagine the chaos — and embarrassment—which will be provoked when (not if) the 9,000 PALEA members escalate their mass action and throw the incoming schedules of APEC heads of state, dignitaries, and media into a tizzy?
If President Ramos, as we warned in this corner only Wednesday morning, doesn't realize by now that he and not the airline is the main target of the labor agitation, he had better take a hard, second look at the turmoil. It's a case of blackmail, pure and simple.
Those who whipped up the angry confrontation, ostensibly between labor and management, surely picked the time and place of their "attack" very carefully and maliciously. They struck at the very moment scores of thousands of Filipino commuters — executives, workers and students — were attempting to rush back to their home provinces to spend Todos los Santos (All Saints' Day) with their families and their "loved ones" in cemeteries and burial plots all over our archipelago.
Naturally, there is anger, confusion, desperation and despair, not only in the Ninoy Aquino International and Manila domestic airports, but in airports all over the country. The "wildcat" strikers have been coached very cleverly by the phalanx of lawyers advising them, and calibrating their moves. They are claiming that PAL has engaged in "union busting", a ploy which, they believe, "exempts" them from the 30-day "cooling off" period mandated by law must be observed by all sides after the filing of an official "strike notice". What nonsense. If they get away with that obvious gambit, then they'll know that the government is wishy-washy — and subsequently they'll go for the jugular.
The cancellation of international flights, which has resulted in passengers, luggage and cargo stranded and misplaced in various air terminals here and abroad, is a foretaste of what could be mounted to upset the nation's year-long preparations for that landmark event, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. The agitators think they have FVR and his administration by the short and (you supply the rest of that colorful expression)...And so, the question is inexorably put: Will the President and his Department of Labor and Employment yield to this insolent demand for "ransom"?
The ball is in the President's corner, not that of PAL management — and he'd better believe it.
* * *
The namby-pamby treatment by the labor department of the June 1994 PALEA strike leaders and organizers led to this present impasse. When the PAL employees staged a similar wildcat strike at the time, the airline was still under government control and management, the strike was declared "illegal" by the authorities. Under our laws, this, means that then Labor secretary Nieves Confesor, who had assumed jurisdiction over the labor dispute, in an order dated June 3, 1994, should have upheld the PAL management's decision to "fire" the 181 PALEA officers and members who had mounted the June 16 strike.
Instead, Secretary Confesor and the DOLE asserted that the strikers should only be "suspended" (contrary to what the law requires) and subsequently, a large number of them had to be "reinstated". A case to resolve the issue is still pending in the Supreme Court up to now — and the high tribunal's delay in handing down a decision is what complicates the situation.
In the meantime, 21 of the strike leaders ordered "dismissed" in 1994 are still members of the PALEA board and were thus able to influence the decision to undertake strike action.
This is a time, I submit, for the President and the Cabinet members concerned (including Labor Secretary Leo Quisumbing) to show their mettle. Will they cave in? Or will they defend the national interest?
If you will recall, United States President Ronald Reagan was faced with an even graver crisis in 1981 when the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) threatened to strike if the government did not grant their demand for a huge salary increase.
Reagan told the PATCO members that he well understood their plight, having been a labor leader himself when he was President of the Screen Actors' Guild (and, in fact, had led the actors in their first strike). He pleaded, however, that America's taxpayers would not bear the burden of such a large salary hike which would have cost almost $700 million a year.
He warned the air traffic controllers, whose essential job it was to man the Federal Aviation Administration's airport control towers and radar centers around the country that he "would not countenance an illegal strike nor permit negotiations to take place as long as one was in progress."
Reagan was mindful that the PATCO was one of "the handful of national unions that had backed me in the election" (his own words), but underscored that "no president could tolerate an illegal strike by Federal employees." He considered, he pointed out, air traffic control a vital government service.
Nonetheless, the PATCO membership walked out on strike, paralyzing domestic and international flights all over. Reagan then warned those who had left their posts or were on the picket line that if they did not return to work "within forty-eight hours", their jobs "would' he terminated". In retrospect, as Reagan recounted in his memoirs, An American Life, the stubborn decision of the air controllers to continue their strike proved their undoing. "I think that members of PATCO were poorly served by their leaders. They apparently thought I was bluffing or playing games when I said controllers who didn't honor the no-strike pledge would lose their jobs and not be rehired.”
Reagan mobilized a number of air controllers who decided not to join the strike, and sent the US Air Force air controllers and personnel to take up the slack. He vowed that he would crush a strike which endangered the safety of thousands of passengers on hundreds of airline flights daily "and threatened more harm to our already troubled economy." He rushed the training of new air controllers to replace those who defied him and refused to return to work.
The 70 percent of the FAA's force of 17,000 air controllers who refused to end their strike by his deadline were terminated. Up to now, the "dismissed" air controllers have never been able to land any job with the FAA or any agency of the government, or on any US airline.
* * *
A similar challenge was faced by the Australian government when pilots and airline personnel struck on all Australian airlines a few years ago. The widespread walkout disrupted business and even pleasure travel all over Australia, crippled the economy, and threatened to erode Australia's viability and credibility entirely.
After weeks of waffling and pleading the federal government in Canberra and the states' administrations decided to get tough with the strikers. When the strikers defied the final ultimatum issued by the authorities, the military were sent in to fly all airplanes, man airport control towers, and take over all jobs on land and in the air. The strikers were informed that not only were they "fired", but that they would be prohibited from taking any jobs in the airlines or at airports for the rest of their lives.
The strike was effectually "broken" in the end, but not before it had caused much damage to the economy. Incidentally, none of the pilots who participated in the walk out can, to this day, be authorized to fly in Australia. Most of them have had to hire out to airlines in other countries at large cuts in pay, or take lesser employment in various industries. Even those who managed to acquire jobs had difficulty finding employment owing to the stigma which had attached to them of being “troublemakers”.
As for Philippine Airlines which was taken over by business tycoon Lucio Tan 18 months ago, this is a make-or-break crisis. PAL is embarked on a $4-billion refleeting program, meaning that 36 new and expensive aircraft will have to be procured from Boeing of America and Airbus Industries of Europe, if our national flag carrier is to regain lost standing and begin to hold its own in the fiercely competitive skies of international aviation. A strike joined by all of the 9,000 PALEA members (let's see what the Airline Pilots of ALPAP and the flight attendants of FASAP will do), if it occurs and even worsens, will surely destroy the airline. And then, what will the 14,000 jobless PAL employees do? Our world reputation will be in tatters, and APEC will be torpedoed.
If what we're witnessing is not sabotage — what is it?
The awful truth is that, with 14,000 employees, most of them hired during the decades the government ran PAL (into the ground, critics say), the national airline is greatly overstaffed. PAL could be operated more efficiently and cost-effectively with less than 7,000 employees — and still become world-class with a restored "on time" record. However, PAL President Jose "Pepeton" Garcia and the PAL board have been assuring all employees that nobody will be terminated, and begging them to cooperate in the effort to "save" PAL.
If that's "union busting", then we have an entirely new definition of the word.
FVR must act decisively in this grave matter. It's not something which can be left to his bungling subalterns. Our national honor is at stake. APEC is at stake. His own presidency, and its place in history, are at stake.
* * *
One consolation we have is that the limited PAL "wildcat" strike failed to ruffle the aplomb of visiting German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and his delegation of Cabinet ministers and businessmen. Bitter strikes have become an almost daily feature on the landscape of western Europe in the past few months and in Germany in particular, strikes and angry demonstrations have recently been the norm rather than the exception – particularly the massive walkout staged by the trade unions affiliated with IG Metall and other powerful federations in opposition to sick pay cuts and other drastic budget austerity measures. Kohl, 66, who was described as just a so-so type of leader when he literally "fell into power" in 1982 when the Free Democrats junked his urbane and polished predecessor, Helmut Schmidt of the Social Democrats (SPD), and allied themselves with Kohl's Christian Democrats (CDU) has emerged as the Strong Man of Europe.
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