The end of a 58-day strike by a section of Air India pilots last week, with none of their demands conceded, demonstrates two things. The first is the limits, if not futility, of industrial action even by the most specialised and highly-trained workforce when business conditions, both internal and external to the organisation, aren’t too good. The second concerns the reasonableness of demands, in the eyes of the management as well as the wider public. In this case, the strike involved only pilots flying on the national carrier’s overseas routes and not their domestic sector counterparts belonging to the erstwhile Indian Airlines, which has since 2007 been merged with Air India. But the strike by the 424 pilots — out of Air India’s total of 1,500-plus — was enough to cause the state-owned airline some Rs 650 crore in losses and ground much of its wide-body aircraft fleet used for international operations, that too in the peak travel season.
If despite all this, the agitation yielded nothing for the pilots though, it only points to the current market realities — of a loss-making airline with accumulated debts of almost Rs 45,000 crore, whose survival hinges on a Rs 30,000 crore taxpayer-funded bailout over the next eight years that is subject to certain milestones being met. By striking at such a crucial juncture, the pilots were clearly overestimating their own strength and underestimating the dire financial straits faced by not just Air India, but the entire airline industry. No management with its back to the wall would have tolerated such action that ultimately benefitted only rival carriers, which merrily hiked fares. The losers were Indian workers in Dubai or Doha having to pay through their nose to fly home, Air India, and the pilots themselves, who are now practically seeking only reinstatement and withdrawal of legal proceedings against those whose services were terminated during the stir.
That raises the legitimacy of the original demand itself. The pilots’ agitation was not primarily over salaries or allowances, but about denying their colleagues now flying single-aisle aircraft in the domestic sector, the right to even train on the new Boeing-787 Dreamliners being acquired by Air India. In other words, they wanted to reserve the privilege of long-haul flights — guaranteeing more flying hours and, hence, faster promotion from co-pilot to commander rank — exclusively for themselves. This, the Government could obviously not have agree to, especially after the Indian Airlines-Air India merger that made it technically difficult to discriminate between the crew of the two previously-separate domestic and international carriers. Even the general public would be loath to such guild-like arrangements intended at maintaining the monopoly of particular trade. While one may sympathise with strikes by blue-collar contract workers over pay parity with regular employees, the same yardstick cannot be applied to those drawing monthly salaries of Rs five lakh or more.