It is widely-received wisdom that AZ somehow died due to the intransigence of its unions and staff. In truth this is about as reasonable as blaming the sinking of the Titanic on its dancing passengers, but I have found people often prefer simple answers to life's complicated questions, and don't like changing their minds.
I certainly don't propose to change anyone's mind with a few posts on PPRUNE! Moreover the public image AZ employees have at large is beyond redemption, and quite frankly in some cases this poor reputation (at least with regards customer service) is deserved.
I do not work for AZ. As a matter of fact I work for a UK company, but I have seen the situation from within and without. I understand that people who have not been exposed to Italy and our often devious way of doing business will not understand. Your opinion would be perfectly valid if we were dealing with a "normal" country and a privately-owned company geared towards making a profit from air transport, operating in a transparent clean capitalist environment. If this were the case it would be perfectly natural to look at these striking employees with horror.
In actual fact you are dealing with an unwieldy and corrupt government-owned ministry that just happens to have airplanes. In sixty years of history it has NEVER been effectively managed to make a profit, only to do political favours to the powers that be, employ friends of friends, and most of all grant extremely lucrative contracts for external procurements and consultancies (lucrative for those inevitably well-connected individuals who were the lucky recipients, almost always wives or relatives of politicians). There is no "business-culture" because it has never been a business.
Just look at the Malpensa fiasco if you need proof as to how political meddling can destroy an already weak company. For the last ten or fifteen years the rising power of the Northern League political party has determined AZ's move to unpopular and inefficient MXP (without closing Linate as would have been necessary). This was done for purely political reasons of course, and despite the fact that 80% of AZ employees lived in and around Rome, not to mention all of their maintenance facilities were in FCO (and by the way this tug-of-war is not over, even now our Northern League politicians are screaming blue murder at AZ's new found Romano-centrism; watch this space).
Air One, which was even more bankrupt than AZ, had the good fortune of owing serious money to a bank closely connected to the current government: thus Air One was amalgamated into the new AZ so their debts could be rolled into the "bad company" portion of AZ and paid off by the Italian taxpayer. It also helps when your major shareholder is the wife of Italy's erstwhile Transport Minister. Notice no AP pilots lost their jobs (although temp contracts have not been renewed) while approximately 800 AZ pilots are now walking the streets.
You will rarely catch me defending AZ's pilot unions as they were fairly well-aware of what was going on, nay, in some cases they participated in milking the cow dry. They are at the very least guilty of not forming a single pilot's union (which might have had a say) rather than the SEVEN unions that represented just the pilots. Must preserve those desk jobs for the boys.
However, the way in which the government have gone about this "privatization" seems designed to infuriate the numerous loyal and hard-working employees that (believe it or not) AZ was blessed with. An unclear policy as to who to keep and who to fire (with many alleged cases of mothers or carers of elderly/infirm arbitrarily excluded from the new company due to their rights to more nights at home under Italian law, and other unpleasantness), the openly sign-or-be-fired attitude and the shocking lack of aviation expertise in the sixteen "investors" that have been handed AZ on a silver platter AZ hardly help.
A quick look at the track-records of these so-called "patriots" should be enough to discourage any optimism as to AZ's future. Not to mention that as a nation we have handed one quarter of our country's air transport sector to the French for about a quarter of what AF had offered only a year ago, plus the Italian taxpayer got to foot the bill for the debts (see Vidal's article "Thank-you Silvio" on Les Echos
Merci Silvio - AERIEN AIR FRANCE-KLM ALITALIA). The whole thing stinks to high heaven, and most of the remaining employees fear that they will be back to square one in a few months time, as has been the case with countless "bail-out and turn-around" plans these last few years. A simple "count your lucky stars you have a job and shut up" will not suffice for those who have witnessed first-hand the results of government mismanagement, fake attempts at privatization and cronyism (although I will grant you that striking won't help).
Italy, with its particular geography, far-flung immigrants and tourist attractions is the ideal place to make money with an airline. It is no coincidence that we are Ryanair's second market (and Easy's, I believe) and that even in this moment of global crisis AF, LH and BA were all vying for a piece of the action. As a country we have failed
spectacularly at providing our citizens with a viable national airline.
As far as AZ personnel and specifically the pilots, they may not have helped the situation, but blaming them for this disaster is like blaming the fleas after the dog has been run over.