ALU Do you regard that as a mistake by the union, a divisive issue? Could it be dangerous?
JF A huge mistake. All the pilots regard it as a big mistake as well. It causes bad feeling. And of course it’s dangerous. If it happened in an office, people would be arguing, ‘Hey! Why are you getting 40 percent more than me, it’s not right, you shouldn’t be’. And if you get pilots arguing like this, flying is really not safe. The civil service is doing this at the moment, trying to introduce changes to the civil service - contracting out services, privatisation, bringing in contract staff on less money. That’s why we joined their demonstration yesterday [7 October]. People said, ‘What are the pilots doing here? What interest is our problem to them?’ Well the common interest is discrimination - we have the same problems as the civil servants. The government doesn’t seem to care, and employment law in Hong Kong is abysmally bad. Yet the government wants Hong Kong to be known as Asia’s World City. But Hong Kong is a place with Third World City employment laws. That’s why we have members suing Cathay Pacific in the USA, the UK, and Australia - because those countries protect their citizens working as expatriates against unfair treatment.
ALU How can you enforce a law from another country in Hong Kong?
JF Very simply. The law in those countries says that if you are a citizen here and can still show the link working as an expatriate (usually by living, owning property, or starting rostered work there), and the employer is abusing you contrary to the laws that apply in your country, you can take legal action, and that is what our members are doing. Hong Kong law doesn’t recognise the concept of unfair dismissal. It recognises unlawful dismissal, which means - say you were dismissed by an employer who did not follow the conditions of the termination element in your employment contract. So if they don’t give you notice of dismissal or payment in lieu of notice, you have been unlawfully dismissed. The only remedial action is that they have to pay you for the period of notice, which is rubbish because there it doesn’t include payment for damages. More enlightened laws around the world say you can’t be sacked unless you are given a reason - but none of our guys have been given a reason, although Cathay directors have got up and made general comments like ‘one of them kept shouting at ground staff’, or ‘another phoned in sick very late on several occasions’, but they have never named individuals, they just tarred all of them with having done something wrong, yet in their written submissions to individuals, they have said there was no reason why we dismissed you, we just terminated you and closed your contract.
ALU And they are happy just to do that?
JF It would seem so. Our members believe that Cathay has sacked 53 pilots as an intimidatory gesture to the others - ‘If you do anything that we don’t like, we are just going to fire you.’ Now it is no coincidence that 49 pilots were sacked on one day, on 9 July, just a few days after the limited industrial action started, and it was intended as a frightener, but it hasn’t worked. And no one in Hong Kong or indeed in the world who has half a brain really believes Cathay public relations people when they get up and say ‘What we did was go through 1,500 pilots’ files and we found 49 who merited dismissal’, because they’ve got a disciplinary and grievance procedure. If they think someone has committed an offence this procedure allows them to investigate, make charges against, and have a hearing. Then there are two rounds of appeal after that. If these guys had really been that bad, why didn’t Cathay follow the procedure? The answer is obvious - they had done nothing, these were just intimidatory sackings, and with the law in Hong Kong, the company can get away with it.
ALU What is the position of the 53 sacked members?
JF The union is supporting them from 9 October. We have put our union members’ subscriptions up to five percent of salary, and we will pay essential living costs of those sacked pilots. We will look after accommodation costs, food and essential living costs, necessary education expenses for children and medical insurance. So when Cathay managers and directors say in public that this dispute is over and the pilots will soon forget the 53 sacked members, by voting to put subscriptions up to five percent to fund these guys, it is clear this dispute is not over, and the union is going to support them in this.
ALU If they win their court cases in London or wherever, how can the court decision be enforced in Hong Kong?
JF Well, for example, the United Kingdom can order reinstatement, and if Cathay doesn’t want to reinstate them, they have to pay further damages. But the best solution would be to get round the negotiating table and sensibly work out how we can end the dispute and get these guys their jobs back and stop all this legal action, because legal action will attract publicity in those countries. Cathay doesn’t need bad publicity. And it’s a sad indictment of the state of affairs that the Swire group, which is headquartered in London, have treated staff out here in a way that is not allowed by UK law. It’s almost as if they still think they are out here running a colony, and they can behave as they like. So if they are getting adverse publicity, quite frankly, they deserve it. I think they can no longer get away with saying that it was fair, no on believes them.
We have had pilots dismissed before, who all went through the disciplinary procedure, so why didn’t they in this case? It’s because there was no good reason. It was just a tactic to threaten other pilots that they could be next.
ALU Is there any suggestion of over-staffing by management that may have led to the dismissals?
JF No. When you talk to the managers who really understand the staffing levels and criteria that you need to run a business the size of Cathay, they know they are under-staffed. And one of the things they have done this year when unilaterally introducing what they call Rostering Practices 2001 on 1 August, was to increase the number of flying hours. That increase, up to a potential 900 flying hours per year from the current contracted 700, is huge. That actually saves them recruiting more pilots, they are just flying existing pilots more. Even now there are dozens and dozens of roster changes every day. Take a typical case - a pilot is rostered to have the whole day off and fly in the evening, so he arranges to do something with his kids during the day, and doesn’t know that’s been changed until the day before, when he is told to come in the following morning.
That is probably the single biggest grievance with the current rostering system. Overseas based members tend to have more stable rosters because there are fewer of them, and the logistics dictate that they can’t do anything else. It is worse for the people based in Hong Kong. One of the common roster disruptions is that management change the aircraft that is going to fly to Taipei say, when only two hundred people are booked on a particular flight, a scheduled B747-400 aircraft that can take 400 people is no longer required, so they swap it for a smaller capacity Airbus A330, and the whole crew has to be changed. I doubt if there is a single Cathay pilot in recent months who has worked a whole roster as it was published. This causes disruption in every day living. And this is also counterproductive for the company - we can help them fix this problem, but they seem to suffer from a mentality which says, ‘If we didn’t think of it, it’s no good’.
ALU How do they square this attitude with the damage it must do to their industrial relations, let alone the business.
JF They work on the basis that none of those things matter as long as people just do what they decide because they are managers and they know best when actually they don’t know best. They don’t realise that they could take the staff with them in partnership and get a better working relationship. Instead they have tried to misrepresent this year’s dispute as being about money. You may have heard a figure of 32 percent mentioned as a pay claim - it’s not true. As part of our attempt to reorganise the salary scales, we say bring the B-Scale captains’ pay into line with the existing A-Scale. So if a first officer on a B-Scale were promoted to captain, his promotional increase would be good, and if his pay scale were incorporated into the A-Scale, and add in extra pension costs, it might come to 32 percent. The pilots wouldn’t get anything like 32 percent. Promotional increases should be omitted from annual pay rise calculations. And the simple fact is that there is not a single pilot who would go through that process this year. And they neglect to say that our pay claim for nearly half the pilots was zero percent - we just said don’t cut their pay this year, as Cathay can afford not to with seven billion profit. Instead they portray the pay claim as 32 percent, so even the spin they give is fiction.
The root of this problem is the discriminatory employment regime of different salaries for different groups of pilots doing the same job. If they don’t sort out the rostering problem it will lead to cockpit fatigue, which causes safety problems. If they just stopped the arrogant way they have been attacking pilots since the end of 1992/early 1993, and worked with modern human resource management techniques to try to improve industrial relations by taking the pilots with them, instead of constantly chipping away at them, they would make even more money, and if pilots were hassle free, safety would not be a worry. We are at a loss to understand what is motivating them other than greed. But even this works against them. For example while this dispute is going on, business travellers are not flying with Cathay.
Not that our industrial action has cancelled any flights. We say to our members, follow this campaign of maximum safety strategy, and go through the paperwork meticulously. Now that can lead to delays because pilots do not have time for paperwork in the reporting time available. So pilots were going to work early to do all the paperwork in time. During industrial action we are saying don’t go early, stick to their time. That leads to delays and that’s Cathay’s problem, and the reason they won’t extend the reporting time is because the moment you report for work, your flying duty period starts, and for certain flights that means they might need more pilots on that flight. So, regrettably, it causes delays but not cancellations. That happens when a typhoon hits.
This year Cathay chartered seventeen mainland Chinese aircraft, and when they were flying them, Cathay Pacific’s own aircraft were on the ground. After that big typhoon 100 pilots were on stand-by duty, but weren’t called in. The schedule was disrupted because of the typhoon, and they could have picked up on all of those flights they had cancelled if only they had used their grounded aircraft. We think they didn’t do it deliberately, because they were using that as part of their
PR campaign against the pilots - so they could say all these cancellations are because of the pilots industrial action. One day 23 aircraft were on the ground, but Cathay didn’t use a single one. With a hundred pilots at home they could have used them. But who caused the cancellations, the pilots or management?
So business travellers have taken their business elsewhere, which has cost Cathay, probably seven to eight hundred million dollars since 1 July. This is how much money they are prepared to waste to break the pilots union - that is what they are trying to do, bust the pilots’ union. All the signs are there. Look at all the classic union busting techniques around the world, and look at the history of what has happened to us.
Other Hong Kong staff unions have been fairly successfully watered down, now Cathay is trying it with pilots. They want a subservient workforce so that they can make more money. Well there’s nothing wrong with profit, that’s what Cathay is in business for - good luck to it. It has probably been the most successful airline ever if you look at their history, and they could have been even more successful over the past few years if they had taken their staff with them.
ALU What is the level of union membership and the level of support between pilots and the other unions?
JF We have about 92 percent or 1,350 of about 1,500 Cathay pilots. We talk to both the other Cathay unions - the Local Staff Union which represents about 20 percent of ground staff, and the Flight Attendants Union which has about 65 percent of cabin staff, but this level is falling because Cathay is denying access to their mailboxes. We have been using the mailboxes for years, but now they have said we can’t use them any more.
There is a great deal of solidarity between pilots and other staff. We are constantly attacked; management on the Cathay Web site, constantly criticises the pilots; in their publications they are doing it; their
PR people do it. They try to drive a wedge between pilots and the other staff, but it won’t work. Pilots and cabin attendants work well together. The Captain is in charge once the plane door is locked, the working relationship is close. Management can never destroy that relationship, in fact Cathay trains the staff in CRM - crew resource management - which is aimed to nurture the on board working relationship. Cathay aren’t stupid, they know they can’t just keep attacking the pilots. And the other grades are also fighting for their jobs - they have seen it before.
We are probably the best organised union in Hong Kong. We have an 800 phone number in Hong Kong, and very sophisticated electronic communications. Our Web site is very good, and our news is updated daily in text and oral formats. 99 percent of our members are on E-mail, and we send out VCDs (video compact disc) of all our meetings to all our members.