Public suffers in PAL strike

The ongoing strike by members of the Philippine Airlines (PAL) Employees’ Association (Palea) which has turned rowdy and even out of control of late is getting to be more of a burden to the riding public than to the airline itself.

Of course, PAL is losing millions of pesos everyday that its operations are not normalized. Not only is it losing market share, but it also has to suffer the stigma of such an unstable labor situation.

In the end, however, it is the riding public and the country in general that suffer from this long winded impasse.

Just recently, we learned that a group of congressmen on the way to Davao City for a public consultation, had to shell out P16,000 for a one way ticket on Cebu Pacific instead of the usual P11,000 or even P8,000 on PAL or AirPhil ever since PAL’s service to the area has been erratic of late. I am told that this kind of undeclared price gouging is happening in the other routes serviced by both airlines and, if PAL’s service does not normalize soon enough, it may even traverse into the international arena as well. Which is not surprising. Remember the first time that PAL declared a kind of “holiday” sometime in the late ’90s when it was also deadlocked in its negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with its workers?

Well, not too long after a strike vote was called and the two parties were gearing up to a standstill, thus disrupting the airline’s normal operations, Singapore Airlines jumped the gun and imposed a 50 percent surcharge on the Manila-Singapore run. China Airlines and Cathay Pacific were well on the way to joining Singapore Airlines when the parties got to sign a “peace pact” courtesy of then President Erap Estrada. Quite apart from the sudden price spikes what really troubled the Estrada administration then was the heavy toll PAL’s “holiday” imposed on domestic travel as well as the flow of goods nationwide since it carried most of those being transported by air. We had hoped then that the same traumatic development will never visit us again. Well, it is now about to be repeated with the latest Palea wildcat strike. Even the militant labor federation, Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU), has advised Palea to stand up for what it considers its rights but not at the expense of the public.

Which is why we cannot but sympathize with the latest advisory made by the airline two days ago when it called on the business community to come around together and petition government to do whatever is legally possible to ensure that the normal course of business is not unduly prejudiced by the selective and oftentimes misplaced application of the law.

Apparently, the airline got squeezed by the wishy-washy and conflicting rulings of two Pasay City courts which issued two contradictory rules on PAL’s petition to prevent the mounting of a strike, a ruling initially upheld by the executive judge, which was subsequently reversed by another judge in another sala.

In any event, the conflicting rulings has stymied PAL’s rights as an employer and opens the floodgates for other misplaced actions in other companies. Actually, the plea is coming from the riding public more than PAL itself. The request is quite simple — let the PAL employees’ union, Palea, or what’s left of it, proceed with its ongoing efforts to overturn the decisions made by the Department of Labor and Employment (DoLE) secretary and affirmed twice by P-Noy himself approving the “outsourcing” of its catering, ground handling and passenger services but not to the extent of preventing the company’s normal operations.

As Palea and its lawyers should know, there are certain parameters (protocols is how some labor lawyers call it) even in the case of hotly contested labor cases. One such core protocol is for management to exercise “ingress and egress to its own assets,” that is, strikers cannot and should not be allowed to take over such assets or prevent management from making full use of these for its normal operations. What happens usually is for the strikers to have a “moving picket” as the principal form of showing displeasure and concern over management’s actions. Indeed, in this case the outsourcing plan is far from being fully resolved since Palea can go all the way to the Supreme Court to question’s the DoLE and P-Noy’s actions.

But absent such final ruling, it stands to reason that PAL can proceed with the plan subject only to the terms indicated in the DoLE order as affirmed by Malacañang. Thus, the airline has started issuing out separation packages to the 2,600 employees affected by the plan itself. The airline says about 1,200 members of the union have accepted the separation package including their full retirement benefits. Another 600 workers have opted to join the outsource service providers which, by the way, have committed to absorbing all of the 2,600 workers for a full year, no questions asked as part of the transition operations after which everybody undergoes the normal performance “review and assessment.”

To my mind, this is a most generous transition package guaranteeing the workers employment at their present salary levels. That makes 1,800 members opting to work within the outsource plan earlier initiated by PAL and approved by DoLE and Malacañang. That is about 70 percent of the total affected workforce which makes it a super majority decision already.

So, what’s preventing the police from doing their duty in keeping the peace and restrain the minority from imposing their will on the company’s operations?

Indeed, the situation can immediately normalize if the police and the courts can summon the will and the courage to do their duty and let the airline resume its normal operations even as the workers continue with their efforts to seek the reversal of the outsourcing order.

To look the other way or be cowed into allowing a breakdown in the company’s operations is tantamount to letting the minority do its worse while the company and, yes, the public and the other stakeholders dependent on PAL for their own livelihood and operations suffer. That is simply unacceptable. –Jonathan De la Cruz, Daily Tribune