Right cause, wrong tack

One of the things I heard in the wake of Palea’s wildcat strike at the height of Typhoon “Pedring” was this: “Grabe naman sila, they’ve gotten so spoiled. Didn’t they just get a Christmas gift from the Supreme Court in the form of a ruling ordering PAL to pay them their back wages?”

No, that wasn’t Palea, that was Fasap, or the Flight Attendants and Stewards Association of the Philippines. A couple of months ago, the Supreme Court ruled with finality that PAL’s retrenchment of 1,400 flight attendants in 1998 was illegal. It had already made that ruling some years ago but PAL had blocked it with a couple of motions for reconsideration. In quashing the second one, the Supreme Court said PAL had shown itself “less than honest in its claim.” It said it would no longer entertain further motions for reconsideration and ordered PAL to pay the back wages of the retrenched personnel.

This confusion alone shows the folly of the wildcat strike.

From Palea’s perspective, the strike was well past due. They had been complaining about PAL’s labor policies for some time now, and management hadn’t heeded them. Worse, the labor department agreed that management had the right to retrench them. The retrenchment was imminent: it was to take place last Saturday, Oct. 1. They had no time to lose.

But from the public’s perspective, the strike was sudden and capricious. What the hell did they know of Palea’s problems? If Palea was desperate, only its members knew about it. They themselves, the public, knew nothing, or next to nothing, about it. All they knew was that the airport personnel refused to move their asses at a time that the passengers badly needed them to do it. A storm was raging and they were desperate to quite literally fly to the arms of their loved ones.

It’s not government Palea should be worried about, it’s the public. It’s not government Palea has pissed off, it’s the public. The tack of calling P-Noy an enemy of labor and in league with Lucio Tan doesn’t make things better, it makes things worse. It’s thoroughly unthinking. I don’t particularly care about Mar Roxas, he probably is, on both counts. In fact, it’s not just unthinking, it’s suicidal. Why make an enemy of a potential ally? Why make an enemy of someone who is out to make Tan pay for his sins, not the least of them tax evasion, or fraud? The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Surely even unions know that?

Maybe Palea thinks that by showing this kind of militancy, or by being controversial, it is finally getting some media mileage? Maybe, but unlike show biz where no news is bad news, in union work, some news, particularly bad news, can be the death of you. Controversy about movie stars can only drive people to watch their movies. Controversy about unions can only drive a strike to the ground.

There’s a precedent for this. In June 1998, PAL’s pilots also staged a wildcat strike abandoning their posts during the peak season, when a horde of Filipinos were flying in for the Independence Centennial. The pilots had perfectly valid grievances. But their action did not get them heard, it got them drowned in a roar of public outrage. The strike got little sympathy. The pilots lost the public, and with that lost their strike, lost their jobs, and lost their chance. Thankfully, they did not lose their licenses, many of them finding a better place in other airlines, local and foreign.

A pity if Palea’s strike would meet the same fate because its grievances are perfectly valid as well. By the time this comes out, PAL will have terminated the services of 2,600 regular employees. The problem is not the size, it is that PAL wants to terminate them and rehire them again as contractuals under another service provider at half their wages. Some of the employees have worked for as long as 20 years in the company and were earning P20,000 a month. If they agree to be rehired, they would be doing exactly the same thing they were doing before for only P11,000 now. If you were that employee, wouldn’t you be furious too?

Not surprisingly, only a few desperate souls have agreed to it. What makes it worse is that during Erap’s time Palea agreed to sign a 10-year moratorium on collective bargaining in exchange for certain concessions, among them job security. The strikers have a point when they say that you want to see economic sabotage, don’t look at them, look at the PAL management. What it is doing is economic sabotage in ways that give whole new meanings to the concept. It is sabotaging the dignity of labor, word of honor, and fairness and decency, the cornerstones of a just society.

Contrary to PAL’s claim that it is losing money, which compels it to resort to such oppressive means as this, it is in fact raking billions. It did so last year, according to the calculations of all the unions. PAL is the only company that claims to be losing money that its owner, Lucio Tan, refuses to sell to someone who can run it without hiding behind an Erap, clinging to it instead with the tenaciousness of a leech.

The Supreme Court’s felicitous description of PAL’s retrenchment of the 1,400 flight attendants applies as well, or far more aptly to PAL’s retrenchment of the 2,600 ground crew: “less than honest.” In the one as in the other, there was no lack of alternatives to cutting the workers’ wages by half by that ruse. In the one as in the other, there was only exploitation to justify it.

Unfortunately all this is being lost by Palea’s knee-jerk response to the problem. You want to strike, fine, but first strike at the heart of the public. Get the public to understand your cause, get the public to sympathize with it, get the public to appreciate it.

Otherwise, well, remember the pilots, and despair.