Oval3Holer
4th Apr 2018, 04:22
You youngsters (and potential Cathay new joiners) need to read this. It will show you that the malicious rot in the career of a Cathay pilot started 25 years ago and is reaching its ultimate conclusion right now:
ALU Interviews John Findlay, General Secretary of the Hong Kong Aircrew Officers Association
2001-10-01
During the 1970s, 1980s, and the early 1990s, Cathay Pacific was a very profitable company with good industrial relations at all levels. Part of the reason for the good relationship was that pilots were among the best paid in the world and work schedules were undemanding.In the early 1990s, management decided to expand into the big league, so things had to change. Cathay saw that the easiest way to reduce costs was to reduce staff costs. However, the way in which this first round of cost-cutting took place sowed the seeds of the present disastrous industrial relations situation.
In 1993 management imposed a ‘B-Scale’ system of pay and conditions. Pilots accepted the B-Scale system in exchange for a negotiated pay rise which was incorporated into a system renamed A-Scale.
B-Scale salaries for new pilots were about 35 percent lower than A-Scale. But hidden within the B-Scale fine print were lower annual salary increments and lower increases for promotions; projected B-Scale career earnings worked out 50 percent less than the A-Scale. But after the first six months or so the whole contract was altered, giving B-Scales less leave, and reduced benefits and contractual rights - mostly changed at Cathay’s discretion. The B-Scale contract worsened over a period of about two years because of “company discretion” clauses in the contract.
Since 1992 there have been no negotiated pay increases for all aircrew groups.
Introduction of B-scale was a complete success for management.
In 1994 Cathay then attacked the A-scale employees, by degrading the A-scale contract: six weeks’ leave instead of eight weeks; three monthly overtime instead of monthly; reductions in travel benefits; “Company’s sole discretion” clauses; and other degradations.
Most pilots willingly signed the new contract. The few who did not sign up are still on their old contracts. The union cannot explain why pilots signed up, but short-sightedness is the kindest way to interpret the probable reason.
Then, introduced unilaterally by Cathay, came a series of new working systems including ASL and Right Choice, all of which degraded conditions while maintaining a divided workforce through differing conditions in employment contracts.
In 1996, the A-scale pilots received their last pay increase of 2.5 percent - way below the rate of inflation at the time.
After the introduction of A- and B-Scales, perhaps Cathay’s most divisive new initiatives concerned Flight Time Limitations (FTLs) which governed rest time rules, and Rostering. Day-to-day rostering became even more chaotic, with 16,000 roster changes in December 2000 alone. Pilots spent up to 4 months without flying a single trip that appeared on their roster. Individuals reported for work to go to Manila overnight and ended up on a week’s flight to Toronto. Hong Kong-based pilots were spending up to a third of their available work days on reserve - a far cry from the contractual 28 days.
In a series of changes, some involving the government’s Civil Aviation Department and court challenges, judges and government officials predictably sided with Cathay Pacific.
This was the state of relations when the 1999 dispute occurred.
Interview:
ALU What is the state of relations between your members and Cathay Pacific?
JF In the early nineties Cathay decided on cost cutting measures. For years they hadn’t applied much in the way of cost controls, they were making too much money and were too busy counting it. [laughter] To be fair I think they needed to do it but the way they went about it was all wrong, and they haven’t learned from the errors of their ways over the years.
Really all they have done is to succeed in alienating what was probably the most dedicated group of pilots in the world. Pilots don’t just fly aeroplanes for money; a pilot traditionally would work towards a major airline, and having made it to a major airline he or she will stay there for their whole career, so for people to give up the potential of working for a major airline in their own country and come to live in Hong Kong, especially before 1997, airlines had to make it attractive for them to come here. So if people commit to Hong Kong, once they are here, the company knows that to some extent it can blackmail them.
Seniority is the guiding principle in pilot’s lives. You work for an airline starting at the bottom and work your way upwards. This works for the companies as well. Regarding the investment needed to train pilots, the company also does not want high staff turnover, but they know if they really want to attack the staff, reducing salaries or making them work longer hours, many people say well if they don’t like it they can always go, but if they leave they have to start at the bottom again. I cannot think of another profession where this doesn’t apply - doctors, solicitors, accountants, and even Cathay managers and Director, usually only move for promotion and more money.
Since I arrived here around ten years ago, this is the first time we have taken industrial action. Indeed, in its 37 year history, the HKAOA has never before taken industrial action.
ALU In 1999, didn’t you take industrial action?
JF This present dispute dates back to 1999, but the pilots didn’t take industrial action, Cathay did. They said if you don’t sign this new contract that we know you don’t want, and there were pay cuts of up to 28 percent involved, they would sack the pilots; that is industrial action in my book. And at the time people were hugely worried about the prospect of finding another job, their families welfare, children being forced to leave schools, etc.
Our members were suffering stress due to worrying about the job - you can imagine when they went to work they worried ‘am I going to get fired’, and that is not a safe working environment. So we advised our members to consult their doctor if they were feeling stressed, because the law relating to aviation in Hong Kong is very specific, it says a pilot may not operate if he is, or thinks he is, unfit to fly. Some doctors say even if the thought just crosses your mind, you are not fit.
So we told them to see the doctors, and the doctors said ‘you are not fit to fly’. So all the pilots who weren’t flying in 1999 were doing so on the strength of doctors’ notes - the majority of them were Cathay Pacific’s own doctors. And it caused a huge amount of disruption. Cathay took the industrial action and they were the cause of the considerable disruption to service.
The dispute was never sorted out properly. We were prepared to negotiate salary cuts, improved productivity etc., but Cathay said that finances were bad. We said that we didn’t believe them and asked for proof. We thought they were over the worst of the Asian recession. But they refused to give us their own forecast about the way the company was going, and our view was that in 1999 Cathay would make a profit and increased profits as time went on. Their argument was that they would make a loss in 1999, might just break even in 2000, but would not be in the black until 2001. We just did not believe them, the figures available seemed optimistic, and events proved us right - they made HK$2 billion profit in 1999, and over $5 billion in 2000. This demonstrates that what we were saying in 1999 was true and what they were saying was not. They knew they were going to make a profit, but they used the recession - they use anything they can - to convince staff - of all grades - that Cathay is in trouble, ‘You better not be after pay rises or we might have to make redundancies,’ - they rule by fear.
So as part of the deal in 1999, there were pay cuts for grades on A-Scale, those employed before April 1993, and small pay rises for B-Scale. From that agreement a three percent rise was agreed for this year for the post-93 pilots, subject to review in the light of Hong Kong’s economy and subject to the company’s performance. We say that with HK$7 billion profit over the last two years, the three percent should be increased and because of a disparity between the two scales we wanted to have an improvement in the captains’ salary scales for the B-Sale, which the company admitted were below industry norms. And there was also an agreement that we would recommence talks on rostering by the end of October 1999.
After over 50 meetings we just couldn’t get anywhere with them, and that really was the precursor to this year’s dispute. When we asked them to talk about improving B-Scale’s three percent this year, we said we would like to talk about other items related to salary and pensions, and they agreed to talk about it. They even offered an increase using an hourly payment for extra hours flown over the contractual maximum. So, instead of taking the third year cut, they actually agreed to make more money available for the old A-Scale grades who would have to fly more hours, and they offered that without us asking for it. Yet they have the nerve to say that we broke the 1999 agreement. Well I am asking them, ‘Where did we break it?’ - We didn’t break it at all.
We had talks with the [Hong Kong government] Labour Department this year as we did in 1999, and at those talks we couldn’t make progress. So here we are in dispute.
ALU How are government departments to deal with?
JF I find them totally neglectful of their duties. We have approached the Chief Executive, Tung Chee-hwa, Sandra Lee [Secretary for Economic Services], and Selina Chow from the Tourist Association. Just a few weeks ago, they all said the pilots should be getting back to work, they shouldn’t be causing a dispute, and they are the best paid pilots in the world - which is factually incorrect. Fifteen years ago, there is no question that our pilots were the best paid in the world, but not now. Post-1997 there is not the uncertainty there was. So you don’t have to pay expatriates so much to live and work in Hong Kong, and we accept that. But this isn’t a pay issue, it is about rostering; it is about contract abuse.
For example two senior officers in this company; both are relief-captain-qualified, they both fly the same aircraft, they do exactly the same job, and one of them gets 40 percent less money than the other. This came about after April 1993 when they said, ‘we can get pilots here for less money than we are paying and we are going to do it.’ And they did, and the union didn’t resist it.
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.
Hong Kong is not union-friendly, not employee-friendly; the government supports business. In June of 1997 the then colonial government introduced a whole range of employment law, sweeping changes and improvements in legislation introduced by Lee Cheuk-yan of the Confederation of Trade Unions, and it could have given a lot more protection for the working people of Hong Kong. But the handover was in July and by August it was all repealed. We are not affiliated to the CTU, but work very closely with them.
ALU In the light of 11 September at the World Trade Centre and the current falls in passenger levels, do you think it will affect this action or the future of Cathay Pacific?
JF I don’t think it is going to damage what we are asking for. We are not asking for anything outrageous, we just want better treatment. The sad events of 11 September will impact on people flying, that’s inevitable, but actually Cathay is quite well placed to be among future leaders of the recovery. The HKAOA membership actually wants to be part of that recovery process, but as a partner not a whipping boy [= scapegoat].
https://amrc.org.hk/content/alu-interviews-john-findlay-general-secretary-hong-kong-aircrew-officers-association
ALU Interviews John Findlay, General Secretary of the Hong Kong Aircrew Officers Association
2001-10-01
During the 1970s, 1980s, and the early 1990s, Cathay Pacific was a very profitable company with good industrial relations at all levels. Part of the reason for the good relationship was that pilots were among the best paid in the world and work schedules were undemanding.In the early 1990s, management decided to expand into the big league, so things had to change. Cathay saw that the easiest way to reduce costs was to reduce staff costs. However, the way in which this first round of cost-cutting took place sowed the seeds of the present disastrous industrial relations situation.
In 1993 management imposed a ‘B-Scale’ system of pay and conditions. Pilots accepted the B-Scale system in exchange for a negotiated pay rise which was incorporated into a system renamed A-Scale.
B-Scale salaries for new pilots were about 35 percent lower than A-Scale. But hidden within the B-Scale fine print were lower annual salary increments and lower increases for promotions; projected B-Scale career earnings worked out 50 percent less than the A-Scale. But after the first six months or so the whole contract was altered, giving B-Scales less leave, and reduced benefits and contractual rights - mostly changed at Cathay’s discretion. The B-Scale contract worsened over a period of about two years because of “company discretion” clauses in the contract.
Since 1992 there have been no negotiated pay increases for all aircrew groups.
Introduction of B-scale was a complete success for management.
In 1994 Cathay then attacked the A-scale employees, by degrading the A-scale contract: six weeks’ leave instead of eight weeks; three monthly overtime instead of monthly; reductions in travel benefits; “Company’s sole discretion” clauses; and other degradations.
Most pilots willingly signed the new contract. The few who did not sign up are still on their old contracts. The union cannot explain why pilots signed up, but short-sightedness is the kindest way to interpret the probable reason.
Then, introduced unilaterally by Cathay, came a series of new working systems including ASL and Right Choice, all of which degraded conditions while maintaining a divided workforce through differing conditions in employment contracts.
In 1996, the A-scale pilots received their last pay increase of 2.5 percent - way below the rate of inflation at the time.
After the introduction of A- and B-Scales, perhaps Cathay’s most divisive new initiatives concerned Flight Time Limitations (FTLs) which governed rest time rules, and Rostering. Day-to-day rostering became even more chaotic, with 16,000 roster changes in December 2000 alone. Pilots spent up to 4 months without flying a single trip that appeared on their roster. Individuals reported for work to go to Manila overnight and ended up on a week’s flight to Toronto. Hong Kong-based pilots were spending up to a third of their available work days on reserve - a far cry from the contractual 28 days.
In a series of changes, some involving the government’s Civil Aviation Department and court challenges, judges and government officials predictably sided with Cathay Pacific.
This was the state of relations when the 1999 dispute occurred.
Interview:
ALU What is the state of relations between your members and Cathay Pacific?
JF In the early nineties Cathay decided on cost cutting measures. For years they hadn’t applied much in the way of cost controls, they were making too much money and were too busy counting it. [laughter] To be fair I think they needed to do it but the way they went about it was all wrong, and they haven’t learned from the errors of their ways over the years.
Really all they have done is to succeed in alienating what was probably the most dedicated group of pilots in the world. Pilots don’t just fly aeroplanes for money; a pilot traditionally would work towards a major airline, and having made it to a major airline he or she will stay there for their whole career, so for people to give up the potential of working for a major airline in their own country and come to live in Hong Kong, especially before 1997, airlines had to make it attractive for them to come here. So if people commit to Hong Kong, once they are here, the company knows that to some extent it can blackmail them.
Seniority is the guiding principle in pilot’s lives. You work for an airline starting at the bottom and work your way upwards. This works for the companies as well. Regarding the investment needed to train pilots, the company also does not want high staff turnover, but they know if they really want to attack the staff, reducing salaries or making them work longer hours, many people say well if they don’t like it they can always go, but if they leave they have to start at the bottom again. I cannot think of another profession where this doesn’t apply - doctors, solicitors, accountants, and even Cathay managers and Director, usually only move for promotion and more money.
Since I arrived here around ten years ago, this is the first time we have taken industrial action. Indeed, in its 37 year history, the HKAOA has never before taken industrial action.
ALU In 1999, didn’t you take industrial action?
JF This present dispute dates back to 1999, but the pilots didn’t take industrial action, Cathay did. They said if you don’t sign this new contract that we know you don’t want, and there were pay cuts of up to 28 percent involved, they would sack the pilots; that is industrial action in my book. And at the time people were hugely worried about the prospect of finding another job, their families welfare, children being forced to leave schools, etc.
Our members were suffering stress due to worrying about the job - you can imagine when they went to work they worried ‘am I going to get fired’, and that is not a safe working environment. So we advised our members to consult their doctor if they were feeling stressed, because the law relating to aviation in Hong Kong is very specific, it says a pilot may not operate if he is, or thinks he is, unfit to fly. Some doctors say even if the thought just crosses your mind, you are not fit.
So we told them to see the doctors, and the doctors said ‘you are not fit to fly’. So all the pilots who weren’t flying in 1999 were doing so on the strength of doctors’ notes - the majority of them were Cathay Pacific’s own doctors. And it caused a huge amount of disruption. Cathay took the industrial action and they were the cause of the considerable disruption to service.
The dispute was never sorted out properly. We were prepared to negotiate salary cuts, improved productivity etc., but Cathay said that finances were bad. We said that we didn’t believe them and asked for proof. We thought they were over the worst of the Asian recession. But they refused to give us their own forecast about the way the company was going, and our view was that in 1999 Cathay would make a profit and increased profits as time went on. Their argument was that they would make a loss in 1999, might just break even in 2000, but would not be in the black until 2001. We just did not believe them, the figures available seemed optimistic, and events proved us right - they made HK$2 billion profit in 1999, and over $5 billion in 2000. This demonstrates that what we were saying in 1999 was true and what they were saying was not. They knew they were going to make a profit, but they used the recession - they use anything they can - to convince staff - of all grades - that Cathay is in trouble, ‘You better not be after pay rises or we might have to make redundancies,’ - they rule by fear.
So as part of the deal in 1999, there were pay cuts for grades on A-Scale, those employed before April 1993, and small pay rises for B-Scale. From that agreement a three percent rise was agreed for this year for the post-93 pilots, subject to review in the light of Hong Kong’s economy and subject to the company’s performance. We say that with HK$7 billion profit over the last two years, the three percent should be increased and because of a disparity between the two scales we wanted to have an improvement in the captains’ salary scales for the B-Sale, which the company admitted were below industry norms. And there was also an agreement that we would recommence talks on rostering by the end of October 1999.
After over 50 meetings we just couldn’t get anywhere with them, and that really was the precursor to this year’s dispute. When we asked them to talk about improving B-Scale’s three percent this year, we said we would like to talk about other items related to salary and pensions, and they agreed to talk about it. They even offered an increase using an hourly payment for extra hours flown over the contractual maximum. So, instead of taking the third year cut, they actually agreed to make more money available for the old A-Scale grades who would have to fly more hours, and they offered that without us asking for it. Yet they have the nerve to say that we broke the 1999 agreement. Well I am asking them, ‘Where did we break it?’ - We didn’t break it at all.
We had talks with the [Hong Kong government] Labour Department this year as we did in 1999, and at those talks we couldn’t make progress. So here we are in dispute.
ALU How are government departments to deal with?
JF I find them totally neglectful of their duties. We have approached the Chief Executive, Tung Chee-hwa, Sandra Lee [Secretary for Economic Services], and Selina Chow from the Tourist Association. Just a few weeks ago, they all said the pilots should be getting back to work, they shouldn’t be causing a dispute, and they are the best paid pilots in the world - which is factually incorrect. Fifteen years ago, there is no question that our pilots were the best paid in the world, but not now. Post-1997 there is not the uncertainty there was. So you don’t have to pay expatriates so much to live and work in Hong Kong, and we accept that. But this isn’t a pay issue, it is about rostering; it is about contract abuse.
For example two senior officers in this company; both are relief-captain-qualified, they both fly the same aircraft, they do exactly the same job, and one of them gets 40 percent less money than the other. This came about after April 1993 when they said, ‘we can get pilots here for less money than we are paying and we are going to do it.’ And they did, and the union didn’t resist it.
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.
Hong Kong is not union-friendly, not employee-friendly; the government supports business. In June of 1997 the then colonial government introduced a whole range of employment law, sweeping changes and improvements in legislation introduced by Lee Cheuk-yan of the Confederation of Trade Unions, and it could have given a lot more protection for the working people of Hong Kong. But the handover was in July and by August it was all repealed. We are not affiliated to the CTU, but work very closely with them.
ALU In the light of 11 September at the World Trade Centre and the current falls in passenger levels, do you think it will affect this action or the future of Cathay Pacific?
JF I don’t think it is going to damage what we are asking for. We are not asking for anything outrageous, we just want better treatment. The sad events of 11 September will impact on people flying, that’s inevitable, but actually Cathay is quite well placed to be among future leaders of the recovery. The HKAOA membership actually wants to be part of that recovery process, but as a partner not a whipping boy [= scapegoat].
https://amrc.org.hk/content/alu-interviews-john-findlay-general-secretary-hong-kong-aircrew-officers-association