Selfish pilots’ strike
When thinking about the strike by China Airlines (CAL) pilots, the phrase “It takes two to tango” comes to mind.
The airline has repeatedly maintained that the benefits and remuneration packages it gives its employees are above the industry average, and that employees and management had agreed to meet within one year to continue negotiations.
The airline has also criticized the Taoyuan Union of Pilots for arbitrarily going on a strike in the middle of the agreed negotiations process. However, it is CAL’s management that should be taking a long hard look at themselves.
We saw senior officials from the airline appear on TV to utter tough rhetoric in paternalistic tones, but we also heard a spokesman for female pilots say: “This is a media circus, holding a discussion meeting in the middle of the night was originally a joke,” in addition to rash remarks made by others.
Frankly, it would be strange if the management and employees of this company were not butting heads.
The pilots were within their constitutional rights to go on strike and there is no legal requirement to provide advance warning of a strike: They were not doing anything illegal.
However, the law exists to set out minimum acceptable standards of behavior within society. On top of these basic building blocks, there is room for higher standards of behavior, ethics and morality.
The pilots’ union deliberately chose to hold the strike during the Lunar New Year period, well aware that all the other airlines were operating at close to full capacity.
By calling a strike without prior warning, union leaders were acting like terrorists who, in full knowledge that all the windows and doors of a hotel are tightly sealed, set fire to the building and take the occupants hostage, leaving them to cry piteously with no means of escape.
At the same time, the striking pilots showed total disregard for the ensuing disaster that they brought upon their ground staff colleagues, let alone the consequences that their actions had for the wider travel industry. They threw innocent colleagues into the line of fire as a way to achieve their aims.
Not only were their methods highly undesirable, they also meant that it was difficult to garner public support. While they were exercising their legal rights, the pilots’ strike revealed an unsightly and ruthless streak, a selfishness and lack of morality.
The public is generally supportive of workers petitioning for better rights and conditions, but this strike by already generously remunerated pilots will have a negative impact on the future of Taiwan’s labor movements, in particular genuinely disadvantaged workers, and it has hurt social justice.
Tseng Tao-hsiung
Taipei
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