PAL flight attendants decry shorter work breaks

Besides their main labor complaints on early retirement age, more work and less pay, Philippine Airlines’ (PAL) flight attendants have another issue to raise: shorter breaktimes during domestic flights.

Instead of an hour — as what has been practiced a year ago — breaktimes of cabin crew members have been halved, Ricky Montecillo, board secretary of the Flight Attendants’ and Stewards’ Association of the Philippines (FASAP) told GMANews.TV.

FASAP raised this point, among many other issues, after talks regarding a new labor agreement between the group and PAL management remained deadlocked.

Flight attendants’ work schedules have become more “hectic” since pre-flight preparations have cut into their breaktimes, Montecillo said.

Cabin crew members are sometimes prompted to serve as many as four local flights in a day since PAL “has to compete with schedules offered by its rivals,” he added.

As a result, some of them are forced to have their meals inside the plane while it is being cleaned by maintenance staff for the next set of passengers, said the FASAP official.

Previously, flight attendants had their breaks and meal times in airport areas “where proper meals are provided.”

PAL management’s move to cut breaktimes “has been done without consideration for the time and place where flight attendants take their breaks,” Montecillo said.

PAL: 30 minutes is enough

However, PAL maintained that a 30-minute break is already “sufficient.”

“It allows the crew to rest and the plane to be cleaned,” PAL spokesperson Cielo Villaluna told GMANews.TV in a text message.

Villaluna also said that the average turnaround time — the period from the time the aircraft lands on an airport up to the time it takes off — is 30 minutes for domestic flights.

Her assertion is supported by the airlines’ position that flight attendants are considered field personnel and exempt from the meal period as mandated by Article 85 of the Labor Code of the Philippines.

Under this Labor Code provision, employers are required to give workers “not less than sixty (60) minutes time-off for their regular meals.”

But that exemption has been contested by the FASAP, citing an April 1989 opinion issued by the Department of Labor and Employment’s Bureau of Working Conditions (BWC).

In an advisory opinion to the Philippine Technical-Clerical Commercial Employees Association, the BWC said that employees cannot be considered “field personnel” if they are “required to be at specific places at specific times…despite the fact that they are performing work away from the principal office of the employee.”

Early this week, both FASAP and PAL emerged from government-mediated conciliation meeting without a new labor agreement.

Both parties have refused to change their positions regarding PAL’s compulsory retirement age of 40 for flight attendants and its policy of unpaid leaves for pregnant cabin crew members.—JV, GMANews.TV