Below is a letter I submitted to the Straitened Times by e-mail on June 18. I sent a copy by snail mail to Mr Chew Choon Seng, CEO of SIA. Predictably(?), I received a rejection slip from the ST this morning, expressing regret that due to the large volume of mail they receive, they can only publish a small fraction of the letters.
I'm curious to know if anyone who wrote to the ST taking Ms Lee to task for peddling misinformation on SQ pilots' salaries got any satisfaction in the form of a retraction or correction.
Rockhound
The Editor
The Straits Times
Singapore
Dear Sir,
I am an enthusiastic air traveller and maintain a keen interest in civil aviation, an interest which has steadily grown and developed since boyhood, although I am not connected in any way with the airline industry. I have had the good fortune to fly with Singapore Airlines, one of the world’s premier airlines, on a number of occasions. It is with mounting concern that I read of the current labour dispute between SIA and its pilots, specifically the draconian pay cuts the company is demanding, the misinformation being disseminated in the pages of your newspaper, and the decision to have the issue settled by an arbitratror.
For an SIA Captain, the reduction in pay, in the form of cuts in basic pay and compulsory unpaid leave, demanded by the company, approaches, and may even exceed 40%. Not even in my own country of Canada, has the national (but privatised) airline Air Canada, so financially strapped it is operating under bankruptcy protection, tried to exact such a price from its employees in order to reduce labour costs. The cut could result in a Boeing 777 Captain, newly promoted from Senior First Officer on the Boeing 747, earning less than he did in his previous position - clearly ludicrous.
The assertion by your writer, Rebecca Lee, in the Insight column of May 31, that SIA pilots are among the most highly paid in the industry is simply false. In reality, their basic pay falls significantly below that of their counterparts in major airlines such as Cathay Pacific and Qantas in Asia, British Airways and Virgin Atlantic in Europe, and all the large international carriers in USA. It is precisely to redress that imbalance that SIA have traditionally awarded their pilots a substantial annual bonus, when, in SIA’s eyes, profits permitted.
Although SIA pilots are well paid relative to the general public, their remuneration must be considered in the light of their skill and expertise, honed by years of training and thousands of flying hours in every kind of weather, on which, in the course of just one flight, the safety of hundreds of passengers and a $100 million-plus aircraft depend. In the case of the SQ 006 tragedy at Taipei in October, 2000, one error - taking a wrong turn off the taxiway - on a dark, rainy, windswept night at an inadequately-lit and -signed airport, led to a takeoff from a closed runway and the loss of 83 lives and the wrecking of the flying careers of two fine pilots. And SIA, in an apparent desperate attempt to avoid reporting a loss for the current financial year, wants to permanently slash their pilots’ pay by more than a third?
On a practical level, how can this swingeing pay cut do anything other than seriously lower crew morale and adversely affect the flight deck environment, with all the attendant implications for safety in the air and on the ground? I can readily imagine the retrenchment a 40% reduction in my pay would precipitate. I have been to Singapore four times and am well aware that the cost-of-living is higher there than in Canada.
As I understand it, there were just four meetings over the space of two weeks between SIA and its pilots’ union, Alpa-S, before an impasse was reached, with neither side shifting from its position, and the dispute turned over for a final and legally binding decision by the Industrial Arbitration Court, whose record of impartiality does not exactly shine. Is this a fair and equitable resolution of the dispute?
In her May 31 article, Ms Lee wrote of SIA’s fear that, were they to cut their non-unionised, overseas-based pilots first (as demanded by Alpa-S), they might find themselves boycotted by travellers unhappy with their unfair labour practices. I submit that, with the savage pay cut they are attempting to impose on their pilots, Singapore Airlines may find that the chickens have already come home to roost.
Yours, etc.