A major airline and its pilots are in contract negotiations. The union is demanding increases of more than 50 percent. So it caught my attention when I read an article about how this airline’s pilots are telling the public that they don’t intend to shut down their company if they fail to get an agreement, but rather, they plan on canceling selected flights or delaying others by 3 or 4 hours at times and locations unknown to the passenger in what has been dubbed by another airline union as CHAOS (Create Havoc Around Our System).
This kind of rhetoric is nothing new in the airline industry. Airline unions call for the resignations of their CEOs. They tell passengers that it may not be safe to fly their airline. Informational picketing is quite common with leaflets saying unflattering things about their company and its executives. They even go as far as renting billboards that are designed to publicly embarrass the company and undermine customer confidence in them.
This type of behavior begs the question, what are these people thinking? Name another industry where unions go out of their way to drive customers away, all but daring them to travel on a competitor. Who pays the employee’s salaries? The passenger! And how does airline labor say thank you? They try to drive them to the competition.
Of course, this is all done in the name of creating leverage in contract negotiations so they can get their members more money, better working conditions, and improved benefits. How can they achieve those goals if their company is being hurt financially by union corporate campaigns? The only way to make sure employees can earn more money and have a secure future is for their company to have a growing stream of revenue and be profitable. If your union is driving away its customers, it is going to be pretty hard to increase your revenues. Their behavior is completely counterintuitive to the stated goals of the union. Make your company more profitable so you can get a bigger piece of the pie, don’t kill the goose that laid the golden egg.
Can you imagine the UAW telling the public not to buy one of their cars? Yeah, let’s get more people to buy Japanese or German cars. That will surely help our plight!!
How about nurse’s unions saying you don’t want to be in our hospital? How about a passenger railroad union telling its customers they’d be better off driving instead of riding the rails? Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face!!
So what can management do in the face of these tactics? Well, the only sensible thing to do is to talk to your employees in a very straightforward way and get them to understand this isn’t a game of chicken. People’s livelihoods are at stake and behavior designed to drive any customers is just plain dumb as it has consequences on the business and the people who are employed by their company.
Unions have done some wonderful things for the American worker in the past, but if labor wants to be relevant in today’s tough economic environment, this sure isn’t the way to do it.
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Welcome to the Empowering Employers and The Survey Says blog by F&H Solutions Group.
I have to say that having a few union contracts recently amend with actual profit sharing initiatives is a slight glimmer of hope for this industry.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, it probably will not carry through with some of the upcoming high profile negotiations that are coming due.
The unions are notoriously blind to the economic realities they face. They are typically focused only on benefitting the most senior (and influential) members of their ranks and use a variety of unsavory tactics to push their agenda - even to the point of attacking their own brethren who may express a opposing viewpoint.
We will undoubtedly hear how much the unions gave up in recent years due to bankruptcy, recessions, terror attacks, etc...with little or no acknowledgement of the tremendous escalation in wages prior to 2001. But what is most troubling about the unions' positions is that they will completely ignore the fundamental changes in the industry. This business is different that any other. The risk/reward relationship is skewed to the point of no return. Those who remain in this industry have to accept these realities and adjust their expectations accordingly.
The common thought is that people in the airline business today (any level, any position) are there because they love the business - the have fallen under the spell of flight. A reasonable person is not going to go to work (or remain) at an airline in the hopes of economic reward...to do so is delusional.