Elize’s love letter

Elize’s godsister sent an email complaining about the atrocious PAL workers’ strike forcing her to miss her job interviews.

The recent strike of Philippine Airlines workers created a huge backlog. More than 14,000 passengers that were victims of stranding will reclaim their right to their airline seats.

Despite the overzealous attention paid to transcontinental flights such as US-Manila and Manila-US, major obstacles were experienced. The nightmare continues. After the strike was considered called off, these thousands of passengers remained stranded, hoping for openings in PAL’s skeleton flights.

For this to happen to the oldest airline of Asia no less, is really an abomination. It will take more than just days, nay weeks, for PAL to fully get back on its feet again. And things will no longer be the same.

Elize’s godsister’s flight to Singapore could not push through, and she was detained along with more than one hundred passengers inside the aircraft. Godsister told Elize over dinner after her love letter, that she cried for days just because of the missed interviews in Singapore. She said, she was called by her job prospects and told not to pursue the applications with them. She cried for many more days after the calls.

But she didn’t cry because there was nothing she could do. She was crying from the pain of being unable to fly and land at Changi Airport, plus everyone including her was shocked when they were locked inside the plane and no one was there to rescue them from what she called, the hideous reptiles. Oh my!

It will cost PAL more than US 20 Million to get back on track. And another huge sum to repair the damage caused by the strike. This one is more costly since it involves the tears and fractures in the Philippine flag carrier’s international reputation, loss of goodwill, bad public relations, notwithstanding the consistent attacks through media of the workers of PAL and their supporters from the Partido Manggagawa, the Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino, Alliance of Philippine Labor, Flight Attendants and Stewards Association of the Philippines, the do-gooders in the Philippine political scene including the President’s closest political adviser no less, and many other supposed long-time and sudden enemies of Allied Group of Companies.

All told, US 100 Million would be a measly sum to bail the airline out of its present predicament. With a 77% drop in income as of March 2011 as reported by Reuters, PAL is certain to suffer more waist tightening measures as soon as word about their declining revenues come in.

This comes at the tail end of PAL’s plan to acquire a new fleet of aircraft that would certainly cost a mind boggling sum. If I owned PAL, I’d be thinking hard twice over about a  lot of critical areas before plunging into the new fleet purchase. And that would be opportunities lost, I know. But what could I do if I was at the top of a business that would crumble if I didn’t plug the holes?

Luckless, PAL has to make do with a sordid situation. Faced by legal battles back home and a labor union run amuck, the airline really has to fend for itself, alone, on its own — something that’s scary for its position as national flag carrier.

Surely, a country with stiffer laws and regulations would not suffer the same fate from its airline workers. But that’s democracy in action, and whether its a tough pill to swallow, PAL has just got to go with the flow and its passengers will suffer with them, until they shift their money to other airlines.

At a coffeeshop sortie at the Intercontinental Hotel, I overheard someone say: “What if PAL offers 20 Million pesos to the union leader?”

The response was: “Huh! Ka Popoy will turn in his grave!”

Another responder: “Mali! Someone just nearby will be smiling up to their ears!!!”

I wonder what someone nearby meant? Do you? Perhaps it’s one of Elize’s godsister’s reptiles slithering near Cafe 365 at the Intercon.

State of the Tarmac

I am so not a lover of the Supreme Court at all.  Honest, I don’t totally hate them, just sickened by their antics and their superlative merchant spirit. If they’re in the mood, everything could absolutely be for sale, including their own mommy.  (Of course daddy got auctioned one year and one day ago today.)

Right now, too much attention is focused on the issue of the recall of the Second Division of the Supreme Court (SC) resolution favoring the petition of dismissed members of the Philippine Air Lines Employees’ Association by the SC en banc.  Thus, it should definitely be worth a few moments to look at the context of the case to see the bigger picture.

Philippine Air Lines – PAL, isn’t turning out huge profits although some people paint the airline to be making tons of money.  For many years, I watched Brian Williams of NBC nightly news continuously reporting the slow death of airline companies in the U.S.  Other broadcast stations abroad also reported this succession of airline companies going down one after another.

Indeed airlines have the highest operating costs compared to other industries. Due to worldwide recession, international travel and exports are at their record lowest. Stability and profitability are beyond reach as people take less leisure trips – indubitably a luxury – so revenues remain at significant lows than during the better years.  The global financial crisis of the past and in recent times, 2008, caused all of these.

Yes, three years and several worldwide high-profile layoffs, business closures and money market meltdowns later, people are still wary of non-essential spending. Business travel slumped, as companies scaled back on spending in this area and in 2012, even import-export activities will suffer considerably.

The bottom line is the key to any profit-oriented company. Higher figures are essential, not for any sort of imaginary bragging rights, but because turning a profit (and the higher, the better, of course) is actually the raison d’être. This does not, however, take away from the other aspects, such as providing service in this case. Nevertheless, no business entity in its right mind would want to operate at a loss. Further, remaining barely in the black is a concept that just doesn’t make much sense.

With these in mind, what is PAL to do when faced with the various challenges? Like many other organizations that were or are in the same situation, the most simple-but-effective answer is: streamline. Among the results of this was Plan 14, formulated in 1998, in which the fleet would be reduced from 54 to 14 airplanes. The laying off of 5,000 employees (including 1,400 cabin crew) was an unfortunate but necessary consequence, as there would then be much more personnel than necessary.

At this point it is imperative to note that among the notable events of 1998 was the Asian Financial Crisis that wreaked havoc on many countries around the world, the Philippines included. At this time, PAL incurred PhP90 billion in liabilities, or PhP5 billion more than its assets. Needless to say, this was not a desirable state for the company to be in.

In addition, PAL is also looking to outsourcing for cost relief. In the same way that companies look towards lower expenditures, many operational components could be handled capably by contracted third parties. This entails relinquishing a certain amount of direct control however it promises benefits on the budget side compared to full vertical alignment. Constant evaluation ensures that things are done the way they should be and at a high satisfaction level.

Streamlining, whether by cutting operations, relying on outsourcing or other methods, can enable a company to stay afloat in a sea of troubles. It seems more than a little unfair to point a finger at PAL and say that it is representative of how Big Business in the Philippines casually tramples over the rights of workers.

Survival is the key; doing what is needed may often not be pretty, but going under is downright ugly.  Imagine the job loss if the company shuttered its operations.

Reforms at PAL should have come decades ago. There is no way to confirm it but the word from the inside is that many important personnel of PAL have gone wayward, getting enmeshed in unconventional forms of making money on the side through smuggling – a dangerous game such as it is since we are living in dangerous times.

On the other hand, certain career officials of PAL strive to keep these personnel in place – despite that many of them are political accommodations. That means those personnel were not wholly qualified nor competent to be in their present posts.

That’s the reason why no one cares if the company goes decrepit, its facilities are rotting and customers suffer beyond the airline’s shame. My friends and classmates have all left PAL for other airlines. All of them rose to high positions in Cathay, Lufthansa, Saudia, Cebu Pacific, Northwest, among many other airlines – you bet they should be very conscientious in their jobs or else they’d have been retrenched too.