PAL Pilot Exodus

[srs78]

Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Editorial

Nineteen flights were canceled over the weekend as 13 captains and 12 first officers resigned from Philippine Airlines. The pilots allegedly transferred to Asian and Middle Eastern airlines which had offered salaries up to thrice the pilots’ pay rates. PAL has rejected the resignations and demanded that the pilots report back to work in the next few days on pain of lawsuits. The airline has also apologized to the public for the flight disruptions, acknowledging its pilots’ supposed moral responsibility to its passengers.
The resignations are said to be in violation of labor rules requiring the pilots to give six months’ notice before resigning, and of company regulations to stay with the airline for a specified number of years to cover the cost of their training. The airline says it takes more than 10 years to “graduate, train, qualify and nurture a pilot to the rank of captain”—and costs more than P12 million.
But other airline employees say that the pilots’ mass resignation is more than a simple case of moving to greener pastures. Some pilots were allegedly forced to take lower salaries, and that their security of tenure was removed. An employee likened the airline’s acts to telling its pilots that they owed their jobs to the company.
Employees are also threatened by the specter of labor outsourcing, an issue that has not yet been resolved. Now flight attendants are complaining of “arbitrary in-flight crew reduction” that has been in place since April.
President Benigno Aquino III recognizes that the disruptions are hurting tourism and trade. A meeting between the government and the airline industry’s represesentatives remains ongoing as of press time, and it aims to push PAL to resolve its conflicts with its employees. And what were supposed to be internal issues have spilled over to the public realm. Because of the public-service nature of the business, the government cannot just sit back and watch.
Still, this is not to say, as some lawmakers suggest, that the government should take over the airline to whip it back into shape. We are certain that when President Aquino talked about public-private partnerships in his State-of-the-Nation Address, this was not what he had in mind.
In the meantime, how PAL intends to attract its pilots back to its fold is a puzzle, especially if they had left as a last resort due to long-standing gripes against management. Maybe, as it sorts out its labor woes and tries to balance its financial with its human resource interests, the airline can include basic courses on professional ethics in its multi-million-peso training for its pilots.