Majority of PAL union members vote to strike

Saturday, 11 December 2010 00:00
The Manila Times
By Darwin G. Amojelar, Reporter

THE Philippine Airlines Employees’ Association (Palea) on Friday said that “substantial majority” of its members voted for a strike against the planned spin-off of Philippine Airlines’ three non-core businesses, as the airline management readied contingency measures to prevent any flight disruptions.
In a statement, Palea said that some 86 percent of the total votes cast were in favor of a strike and a “substantial majority” of its total membership of 2,600 participated in the strike vote. “The 86-percent vote is overwhelmingly given the fact that we had just 24 hours to inform members of the holding of the strike ballot,” Gerry Rivera, Palea president, said.

He added that the successful strike vote conducted among its members brings the union closer to holding an actual strike.
According to the Labor Code, before any legal strike can proceed, a notice of strike must be filed and then a strike vote conducted in which a simple majority of members must agree.

Rivera added that all that remains now is for Palea to file the results of the strike vote at the National Conciliation and Mediation
Board (NCMB), which has jurisdiction of the dispute, and then wait for the lapse of the mandated seven-day notification or cooling off period. The NCMB is an attached agency of the Department of Labor and Employment.

“We understand that a strike at PAL may inconvenience the public. But we also believe that the vast majority of the public are workers and their families who will benefit from Palea’s fight for job security and labor rights,” Rivera said.

The strike vote was announced to Palea members last Monday just after a notice was filed at the NCMB.
The actual strike vote was conducted the whole day of December 7.

Palea is protesting PAL’s plan to spin off part of its operations, a move that will result in letting go some 3,500 of its 7,500 workforce.

In a briefing, Jaime Bautista, PAL president and chief operating officer, assured its passengers that all PAL flights are normal and continue to operate according to published schedules.

“We have in place a contingency program, if it in case the strike happened,” he said.

Bautista added that PAL engaged professional service providers, including inflight catering companies, to augment workers not joining the strike and deploy all available manpower, including supervisors and managers who are more than capable of manning critical frontline posts.

He said that PAL will also endorse affected passengers to its sister airline, AirPhilexpress, as well as to 134 international airline partners.

Bautista said that employees who participated in the recent Palea strike vote are ground workers mostly assigned at the ground-handling, catering and call center offices.

“While their jobs are important, these workers play support to flight operations. They are not directly engaged in flying or maintaining the aircraft. The pilots, cabin crew and mechanics/maintenance workers of Lufthansa Technik Philippines are not part of the planned work stoppage,” he added.

The PAL-Palea labor dispute is being reviewed by Malacañang.

Bautista said that legal avenues can still be exhausted in resolving the management-labor differences.

“The notice of strike that they filed is already decided. If they will strike next week, it’s illegal,” he added.
Palea said that their planned strike is not illegal since there is no labor dispute pending.

“The strike vote stems from the labor dispute docketed as NCMB-NCR NS-11-128-10. That dispute has not been resolved nor been assumed,” Rivera said.

He reiterated the clarification that the issue pending at the Office of the President is PAL’s outsourcing plan which has been affirmed by Labor Secretary Rosalinda Baldoz, while the strike vote arose from a separate though related complaint of individual bargaining by PAL management that constitutes unfair labor practice and union busting.