SQ pilots under political pressure (merged)

[Insider107]

Very interesting to note the post of John Barnes on another thread, to the effect that:

"I think it is all much simpler than we first thought. The fact that the SIA pilots' saga hits the local papers every day and most of the days as front page news is just the proof that the "leaders" are very very worried. They know something is cooking in their own kitchen, and they also know that they can't take it off the boil. The "wind beneath my wings" is getting louder and louder. The locals are finally fed up and are ready to fight. They fight with their feet and just leave."

I believe that he is absolutely correct and that perhaps the "high-water mark" of Lee Kuan Yew's carefully orchestrated campaign against the pilots may have been reached, for the time being at least, pending what will shortly be misrepresented by LKY as prima facie rabble-rousing but will, in fact, be the next wary Alpa-S move to assert its democratic and statutory right to effectively represent the membership in its negotiation of the Collective Agreement (CA). Perhaps for the moment, his minders have convinced him to lay-off, otherwise he's in great danger of wrecking the train set and (to mix metaphors) pull the plug from the dyke and set the dominoes falling in Singapore (third metaphor!).

He is very frightened of the pilots and tacitly admitted so yesterday (courtesy of Straits Times and R. Lee), saying that they had the power to massively disrupt SIA and, by implication, Singapore as well, and that "he was not going to allow that", meaning he would wade in with bare knuckles and sort the pilots out "just like he did the communist vermin in the fifties" (my own alliteration).

And this of course demonstrates another fascinating aspect of this whole affair, which is that the concept of the office of "Senior Minister", implying an elder statesman quietly moving off center-stage and gracefully ceding power to a new Prime Minister is merely LKY "smoke and mirrors" (as mentioned by myself and others, a Singapore specialty). It is now perfectly obvious to even an apolitical ostrich with its head in the silicon that in Singapore every decision on anything at anytime is taken by one man and one man only ¡V and it sure isn't "Prime Minister" Goh Chok Tong and it sure isn't the little boy, "BG" Lee and it most certainly isn't any of the band of highly paid, rubber stamping flunkies, jokingly called "Ministers". No, everything is done with either the approval or on the orders of the "great man" and it will be so, until he dies following which event, the son may face something of a dilemma, as present day Singapore is only held together by the fear generated by his "strong-man" father, always a formula, shown by history, to be a very shaky basis for onward national survival.

So yes, John Barnes, if (or when) the CA negotiations turn to dust, I'm afraid that really, the only voting option for the individual pilot is with his feet (with or without the notice SIA never honors anyway and with or without completing the medieval bonded servitude that still exists in this "first world nation"). In the golden-olden LKY days of the eighties, this might have been considered a radical step but (memo to himself) in today's connected globe, with a steadily recovering air transport industry, it most certainly isn't!