Close to the heart

Fairly recently the Philippine Air Lines employees staged a strike and paralyzed tens of flights in several of the country’s terminals.  I have always taken flights on PAL since I was a young kid.  I still have to try the feel of flying in a different airline.  But for all of my forty odd years in this planet and counting, there was never one occasion when I was stranded like the passengers that were affected by the PAL employees’ strike. Still, my heart bled for all the poor passengers who missed their schedules, suffered the agony of being trapped inside their planes and at the airport, unable to fight their sad plight.

It’s just that the old and rustic PAL is really close to the heart. I will miss flying if ever as Mr. by Boo Chanco of Philippine Star says in his article “Is PAL worth saving?” —

Maybe PAL should just be allowed to fly into the sunset the same way that the proud PanAM, the international flag carrier of the United States for many years, was allowed to fade away when the economics of that airline no longer made sense. With its shaky finances and now, its damaged brand reputation due to labor problems, there may no other choice.

That September day was a truly bad day for the employees themselves, the local and foreign passengers, the airline company and by association, the Filipino people as a whole since the airline in question is the country’s flag carrier no less.

In my work in both fields of finance and the security industries, I have come face to face with a large number of distraught humans who could not take their flight due to sudden, unavoidable circumstances.  One most memorable was during the Mt. Pinatubo explosion in 1991. Hundreds of commuters at the domestic and international airports were sent back due to cancelled flights.  I remember a Japanese guest at the five star hotel where I worked, beckoned me during rounds accompanied by a hotel detective and asked for bottled water and even just P10.00 cash, whatever for he was supposed to use it on.  The guest said he and his wife no longer had any cash left after being stranded several days in the Philippines.

I cannot recalled the name of the Japanese guest but in that same hotel alone, my experience with him was replicated hundreds of times with the other local, but mostly the foreign guests. (I guess our kababayans are really just masyadong mas mahiyain than their foreign counterparts, yes?)

To top it all, that protest on that bleak day of September 27 by the members of the PAL employees association coincided with the raging typhoon Pedring with a trailing tropical storm Quiel at its back. Such a really sordid twist.  At the onset, all I was thinking was that the cancellations were due to inclement weather. Sadly it was not.

If PAL were Sulpicio Lines, one could just imagine the relief of the passengers that the airline cancelled its flights.

But PAL has world class employees and pilots and assistant or understudy pilots. It was the strike of the world class personnel that kept the airline’s jets from flying. Fortunately, the incident appears to be isolated. It does not seem that it has something to do with movements that have political color. Or is there some nuance of color in that strike? In the same way that the Bangkok strike paralyzed the government instead of just the airport? This one really keeps me thinking hard.

The big issue behind all the brouhaha is the plan to outsource the personnel of PAL and this is something that the employees of the former government owned organization vehemently reject.

Possibly, their thinking is that without being in the regular plantilla of the airline, they are in danger of being removed at will by PAL. And so they began their round of protests and whipped it up with a huge main event that crippled nearly all the flights of the flag carrier on September.

By and large, the PALEA and their apologists would be justifying their actions, but I personally cannot agree to the wisdom of that strike.  Unless of course, there was and really is a higher purpose to it, the employees simply hammered the last nail in the coffin.

As to whose coffin that was, we can only guess. But as things appear, the Supreme Court did not side with the PALEA and their affiliate organization, the FASAP over the legal issues on the dismissal of the PAL employees. It was a big blow to the struggle of the mutinous airline employees.

Another Philippine Star columnist says that PAL owner, Mr. Lucio Tan, must have bought the Philippines just because selected Supreme Court rulings favored the group of companies of Tan.  What hogwash!

Perhaps the serious lack of acceptance and understanding of the economics and finance of PAL could really lead to more problems for the airline.  Look at how a lot of grandstanding personalities and politicians are quick to hit at the Supreme Court over the decision disfavoring the PAL employees — we will write more about this in the days to come.

According to a retired former bureau chief of a foreign news daily, a compromise agenda that PAL employees or the FASAP can hammer on is to form their own manpower agency, to engage in manpower supply themselves.  This and many other less adversarial nor confrontational tactics and strategies could certainly be a more positive and healthy move.

It is also written on the wall, that whatever the plight of our country’s private enterprise could worsen in the coming year so there will always be a lose-lose situation instead of a win-win scenario in the near future.  What a waste!

Meanwhile, because of a low tolerance between the parties in the dispute, there will be no resolution and the ultimate outcome might not be good for our taste buds at all.

If the PAL employees can come up with truly constructive demands and fight for them at the negotiating table, it is likely that there will be no need to suffer innocent consumers to prove the point that the end justifies the means, even if the end appears to be wrong.  But if there were really a higher purpose to it all, only the protesting employees, their families and the riding public preferring PAL like I do, have a lot to lose.

And that’s why this issue is really close to the heart.

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