What makes pilots special?
First posted 01:43am (Mla time) Mar 11, 2006
By Solita Collas-Monsod
Inquirer
Published on Page A10 of the March 11, 2006 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
THE Migrant Workers and Overseas Filipinos Act (Republic Act 8042) empowers the government to suspend or ban the deployment of migrant workers in pursuit of the national interest or when public welfare so requires it. It is this provision that is now being used to justify the imposition of a three- to five-year ban on the overseas employment of -- guess who? -- airline pilots.
Oh, sure, the chair of the House committee on labor and employment, Rep. Roseller Barinaga, included aircraft personnel, information technology (IT) engineers and electronic technicians as part of the brain drain that he says is debilitating the country. He also mentioned in passing the shortage of doctors, teachers and health industry workers (which presumably includes nurses, whom he does not specifically mention). But the figures he cited have to do mostly with pilots.
Which immediately raises warning flags. After all, one would have thought that the exodus of doctors and nurses and teachers would have the most far-reaching and long-run negative effects on the country's human development -- and yet no one is suggesting a ban on their leaving. So what makes pilots so special?
The answer can be gleaned from various news reports. Reading them, it becomes obvious that banning pilots from working for foreign airlines will benefit business tycoon Lucio Tan and his two airlines -- mainly Philippine Airlines (PAL), which employs more than half of all commercial pilots. His minions relate it to national interest in the following manner: Because of the pilot exodus (about 60 a year), the number of PAL flights have to be reduced, depriving the Filipino people of much needed airline service, i.e., what is bad for Tan and PAL is bad for the country. A media campaign seems to be in progress to put that message across.
The reasoning is fallacious, of course. It assumes that if PAL is crippled or dies, no one else will take its place, which is nonsense. In the international arena, any number of airlines are ready, willing and able to fill the gap, as was shown when PAL gave up its European flights, with the international community not even noticing it. And there is no reason to think that given a domestic market of 12 million non-poor families, there will be no new airlines forthcoming, or that existing competing airlines (Cebu Pacific Air, for one, whose expansion PAL has repeatedly tried to block) will not be ready to take up the slack.
But isn't pilot scarcity the problem? Where will these other airlines get their pilots? Simple: They entice them back from abroad, or make it less attractive for those who are here to leave, while at the same time preparing for the long term by making sure that the pipeline of pilots-in-training is widened rather than narrowed.
On the pipeline issue, my information is that before Tan took over PAL, it ran a pilot training school that accepted students who had passed entrance examinations and proceeded to train them, and only when they joined PAL were the training costs deducted from their salaries over a period of time. Tan apparently changed that; students must now pay the entire tuition cost (around P1.9 million at present) within a year of entering the school. No wonder the pilot pipeline narrowed, but that can be reversed.
The pilot exodus can also be reversed if we understand why the pilots leave or want to leave in the first place. That is because, they claim, Tan treats them like dirt. Their story: He used his considerable influence during the Estrada administration to have their strike declared illegal, terminated them all and then rehired them under onerous conditions-entry level salaries, loss of seniority (with retirement and pension implications), no union allowed.
To add insult to injury, those salaries reportedly were not increased from then until about one and a half years ago (probably in an attempt to stem the pilot exodus), when in the guise of making them (only senior pilots) part of management, they were given "premium" pay of 15 percent, but with a caveat: "Please note that premium pay is not included in the computation of retirement pay, 13th and 14th-month pay, and leaves commutation."
Senior PAL pilots say they get between $2,500 and $3,500 monthly (not $4,000 to $6,000 as claimed by PAL). The foreign airlines offer them $9,000 to $12,000. But some pilots also say that had PAL offered them even just one-half the industry pay average, they would not leave, to avoid the painful separation from their families.
But instead of using carrots to keep their pilots, PAL uses sticks -- arbitrarily increasing the amounts the pilots must pay to reimburse the cost of their specialized training, requiring them to give six months' notice before leaving, refusing to give them back the 25 percent of their pay that was set aside as forced savings, refusing to give references, using its muscle to harass the foreign recruiters (accusing them of illegal recruitment and sic-ing the National Bureau of Investigation on them) as well.
Failing to stem the hemorrhage despite all these measures, Lucio Tan's PAL, together with other domestic airlines (including Cebu Pacific, alas) is now campaigning to ban the foreign deployment of pilots. If they succeed, not only will the pilots be at their mercy, but the danger of having a domestic airline cartel increases exponentially. National interest? My sainted foot.
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