As they face a barrage of mounting criticism over last Saturday's deadly plane crash, China Airlines (CAL) employees must be experiencing an indescribable ambivalence. Flight safety is as important to flight crews as it is to passengers. Passengers travel by planes once in a while, but flight crews make a living out of doing so. No one cares about flight safety more than they do. The criticisms against CAL for reckless disregard of human lives must be truly unbearable for CAL's employees.
CAL is undoubtedly to blame for the fatal crash. But, as many have pointed out, poor management is the root of the problem. That in turn is a by-product of a political culture in which political support is rewarded with important positions in state-owned enterprises. Both under previous KMT governments and the present DPP administration, CAL has been used as a carrot and a stick by politicians.
With politics overriding everything else, professionalism is a rarity among high-ranking officials at CAL and its majority shareholder, the China Aviation Development Foundation. Indeed, it is politicians who are the real behind-the-scenes culprits in this disaster. Some have rightly said that depoliticization should be the first step in a restructuring of CAL. But that will be no easy task. Once the uproar over the crash has died down, the chances are that the ties between this cash cow of people in power will remain intact.
Since a "top-to-bottom" reform is unlikely, we might as well adopt a different tack altogether and consider the possible roles that CAL employees can play.
The German model could serve as a good example. Most pilots in German airlines belong to the Vereinigung Cockpit union. This has a membership of around 5,000. Flight attendants, on the other hand, join the world's largest joint service union called ver.di, whose members total three million. The two unions of course pursue salary increases and reductions in working hours. They also monitor the airlines' efforts to guarantee flight safety.
The Vereinigung Cockpit union, which organized a strike last year in pursuit of a 35-percent salary increase from Lufthansa German Airlines, also puts a lot of effort into monitoring flight safety. Well-organized and well-funded, the union can seek the collective assistance of pilots to ensure that the airworthiness of aircraft is checked on a regular basis. If the airline refuses to alleviate a problem, the union can use the collective bargaining power of its members to force the airline to the negotiating table. The airline doesn't dare dismiss the requests of such a powerful union. These unions can therefore justifiably be considered an important element behind Lufthansa's excellent record.
By contrast, the outside world rarely hears about the China Airlines Employees Union. Judging from its low-key response to the recent crash, the union pales into insignificance beside the Vereinigung Cockpit union. It has been reported that CAL employees have been complaining on a Web site over the past few days. It's been reported that they are saying that because flight crews were reluctant to serve on the old and ill-fated plane before the crash, the airline's management typically used to "grab" just about anyone it could lay its hands on at the last minute, rather than produce a roster of flight attendants in advance. If this is true, there has obviously been a very serious breakdown in communications from top to bottom at CAL.
Presumably, if the CAL union functioned properly, it would have reported the problem to management in time. If the management had ignored the matter, the union would have put pressure on it, to the extent of taking industrial action, until the problem was resolved. If that had happened, the crash might have been averted.
This is not to say that labor unions are a panacea. But employees on the front line, after all, know best and care most about flight safety.
A well-organized union would push for their participation in policing air safety and stand up against an airline management that may be overly preoccupied with cost-effectiveness. And consumers benefit in the process. If this doesn't happen and CAL is privatized and adopts a new management system within two years, as Premier Yu Shyi-kun recently promised, flight safety will likely remain just a pie in the sky.
To be fair, dysfunctional unions are common in Taiwan. But, with CAL's 10,000-strong work force, its union has very good prospects for developing in such a way that it could serve as an example to other airlines. But the workers must demonstrate solidarity and be willing to support the union with concerted effort. CAL employees should remember that pilots and flight attendants are, after all, workers, no matter how high their incomes and how exalted their status. If this view can be generally accepted, the union should be able to unite all its members to promote reforms "from bottom to top," starting with flight safety.
When will aviation safety at CAL cease to be a nightmare for everyone? For the sake of CAL's image and, more importantly, the safety of its passengers and flight crews, the airlines' employees should seriously reflect on the role of their union.
Huang Jui-ming is an assistant professor at the Institute of Labor Studies, National Chung Cheng University.
Translated by Jackie Lin
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