The management of China Airlines (CAL, 中華航空) yesterday reached an agreement with its employees’ union on the union’s eight listed demands in negotiations, averting a potential de facto strike by workers on Friday, CAL chief executive officer Hsieh Shih-chien (謝世謙) said.
Hsieh headed into yesterday’s session to negotiate with representatives of the China Airlines Employees Union, which covers ground staff, pilots, maintenance workers and other China Airlines employees, following objections and heated exchanges between the two sides in the previous day’s talks.
He confirmed having deliberated on the eight demands put forward by the union in the two-day session, and that both sides have signed a formal agreement, but he declined to give any details of the settlement.
Photo: CNA
Some revisions were made to the eight demands, but they were acceptable to the union, according to representatives at the session, which took place at a CAL office building at the Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport.
The union representatives agreed to settle and announced that they would cancel the planned labor protest on Friday, which called for members not to show up for work by calling in sick for the day.
The CAL labor dispute centered on working conditions and pay issues, including long-frozen annual seniority-based raises and back pay accrued during the freeze.
“We received in this agreement what CAL had owed us for the past 20 years,” union spokeswoman Wang Chao-jung (王昭蓉) said.
She said that some employees might see “minor differences” between their original demands and those now contained in the agreement, “but this is the result of negotiation. If we insist on getting everything, then there might not be a settlement, and both sides would suffer, which would end up sacrificing the rights of passengers.”
“Right at the start, our union believed the battle should take place during negotiation talks, and should not be fought in the street,” she said, distancing her union from the two-day strike by CAL flight attendants last weekend, which saw sit-in demonstrations in front of the CAL headquarters in Taipei and led to nearly 200 flight cancellations and other kinds of disruptions and headaches for thousands of stranded passengers.
“With solidarity by union members, we can get what we want, and there was no need to hold anyone hostage to reach this agreement,” Wang said.
In their demands, the union had asked that the commuting time of all CAL employees be included in the calculation of their work hours, that the travel allowance for all pilots and cabin crew be raised to US$5 per hour, that the subsidy for ground staff members be increased and that the number of their days off — weekends, holidays and national holidays — be increased from 118 to 123 days.
Other requests included increasing benefits and other remuneration for hourly paid workers, increasing the subsidy for professional certificates and providing accommodation and transportation for employees assigned to work in a foreign country, while maintaining their subsidies.
Previous negotiations between the union and CAL’s new chairman, Ho Nuan-hsuan (何煖軒), had broken down after three rounds of talks on Monday, which led the union to decide that one-third of its members would take leave on Friday.
Additional reporting by CNA
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