any contract can be disputed in court. There is a thing called a "contract of adhesion," i.e. a
contract so imbalanced in favor of one party, and which at the time of the signing the other party
had no other choice but to sign. Any agreement found to be a contract of adhesion can be rescinded.
I don't know what a PAL or AirPhil contract says, but my point is it can be challenged in court and actually
resolved in favor of the pilots (although realistically, that'll take many decades to resolve).
If a management representative (or even the CEO) stands before a roomful of pilots and declares all of
them "redundant", who wouldn't start looking elsewhere? Why wait for the ship to sink or to get thrown out,
contract or no contract? If the company is f*cking you, f*ck them back. If everyone at that pilot's meeting was "redundant," why are flights being canceled?
Aha... now the company's finding out, the hard way, that those guys weren't so redundant after all.
Contracts? Leave that to the lawyers. Pilots shouldn't be in the business of interpreting contracts anyway.
There's really more to this than just ink on paper. If this were only about the contract, PAL may have the high legal ground.
But do they have the high moral ground? That's a different story. There is a lot more to this story than pilots just leaving looking
for greener pastures elsewhere. The question that needs to be asked is, why is this problem peculiar to PAL?
Why aren't Cebu Pac and ZestAir A320s sitting on the tarmac for want of pilots?
Breaking that contract already has a remedy, which is to reimburse the company for the cost of the training,
which most guys are willing to do anyway. The company holds post-dated checks covering the training bond which can be encashed anytime.