PAL faces month-long backlog

MANILA, Philippines—Philippine Airlines took to the air again on Wednesday after being paralyzed for a day by a wildcat strike, but said bringing flights back to normal could take a month amid a manpower shortage.

Thousands of passengers were again stranded Wednesday amid a skeleton flight schedule.

“PAL apologizes to the passengers for the inconvenience caused by the flight cancellations and unexpected delays,” the carrier said in a statement.

“PAL… expects to return to normal operations within a month.”

Tuesday’s strike was the culmination of a tortuous program by loss-making PAL, Asia’s oldest airline, to outsource 2,600 in-flight catering, airport services and call center reservation jobs on October 1.

After winning government endorsement for its plan, PAL sent termination notices to its ground staff last month, saying it needed to trim its workforce to 5,000 and save up to $15 million in annual operating costs.

The affected workers staged their sit-in at Manila airport as an act of desperation, but PAL responded by bringing forward its outsourcing plan and immediately replaced the strikers with the cheaper labor.

After calling in the police, who carried many of the striking workers from the check-in counters, the sit-in ended and the airline finally dispatched seven flights late on Tuesday night.

A total of 104 flights were cancelled Wednesday, said an updated company tally, with just 36 flights taking off, half of them international.

PAL said at least 14,000 passengers were stranded Wednesday, roughly the same number as during the strike, out of a normal daily carrying capacity of 20,000-25,000.

A group that it calls “trained management volunteers” was now handling most of the ground crew duties, but service providers should take over all of these functions within a month, the airline added.

President Benigno Aquino, who is flying home later in the day aboard a chartered PAL flight after an official visit to Japan, denounced the strike and said those responsible could face criminal charges.

“What is clear right now is, under the Civil Aviation Act of 2008, any disruption is punishable,” he told reporters in Tokyo.

Aquino emphasized that strikers were required by law to give advance notice, which they failed to do.

Aquino said government lawyers were studying whether the crime of “economic sabotage” was committed and, if so, the strikers could be jailed for up to three years and each fined P500,000 ($11,500).

PAL also accused the protesters of disabling vehicles such as push-back trucks used to bring aircraft from the passenger tubes to the runway, deck loaders used for loading cargo onto the plane, and computer servers.

Its spokeswoman Cielo Villaluna told AFP this was the reason for the ongoing flight delays.

Ground crew union president Gerry Rivera rejected the allegations of sabotage, and accused the airline of illegally locking out its own employees.

“They (protesters) just stood there, they did not touch the equipment. If the replacement personnel now say they cannot operate them, that only means they are not trained,” Rivera told AFP.

The union’s last hope is that the Court of Appeals will declare the outsourcing plan illegal.

But the court has not given any indication it will deliver its verdict before the workers’ contracts are officially terminated on October 1.

The union said just seven percent of the ground crew staff had applied for work with the service providers, since they were being offered salaries that in some cases were less than half their current pay with PAL.