French right to fly in the face of O’Leary
If you missed, or were late, to a pal’s wedding, your own wedding, a job interview, a sales pitch, your first holiday in five years, your first holiday ever, your precious family time, me time or anywhere-but-work time, the following paragraphs will not make you feel any better.
At times like this, calls for a ban on strikes by workers in essential services seem utterly sensible, proportionate and just. It does seem incredibly unfair that the gripes of one set of workers — in this case, French air traffic controllers — should be allowed to cause disruption, disappointment, and expense for tens of thousands of others.
But Ryanair’s call for the European Commission to make it illegal for air traffic controllers to strike shows Michael O’Leary’s cuddly new persona has about as much credibility as the supposedly reformed Luis Saurez.
In a return to pre-reformation O’Leary bombast, his airline demanded action by the Commission, the EU, and the French government against the controllers, who, it said, were “once more attempting to blackmail ordinary consumers with strikes”.
Now, quite apart from the fact that blackmail is a criminal offence and striking is not (yet), that statement has to be taken in context, the context being that Ryanair is a no-fly zone for trade unions of any kind.
It also suited the company to dump all the blame for the mayhem at airports on the striking workers, even though the French air traffic controllers are frequent strikers (“every summer,” as Ryanair put it) and gave notice of their latest action, so all airlines would have known what to expect and should have had enough staff in place to deal with the questions and concerns of frazzled passengers.
But the real weakness in Ryanair’s argument is the impracticality of outlawing strikes. In its statement, the airline huffed: “Many of Europe’s police forces and army personnel are not allowed to strike, while air traffic controllers in the USA are also prevented by law from striking, meaning the skies over the US cannot be closed or severely disrupted by ATC strikes or work-to-rule. The European Commission should apply similar no-strike rules here in Europe.”
That’s fine, in theory — if you share that kind of view — but, in practice, while you may outlaw strikes, you cannot stop people staging a mass withdrawal of their labour.
Call it a blue flu or a sick-out, but it’s essentially a strike by another name and the effect is the same.
No amount of tinkering with industrial-relations terminology is going to put a plane in the sky, a cop on the beat, or a nurse by a bedside, when the personnel to do the job have failed to clock in.
Even if you could criminalise such actions, what penalties could be imposed? Striking workers could be sacked, but Ronald Reagan memorably flexed that muscle with air traffic controllers in the 1980s, terminating the employment of more than 11,000 of them in one fell swoop, and the fall-out was considerable.
Somehow, by drafting in military air controllers and putting senior managers back at radar screens, Reagan got planes flying again, but it took years to recruit and train a proper replacement workforce — years when the prospect of passing through US air space was not something to be contemplated by the fatalistic.
You could try for an even tougher approach — jailing the ingrates — but that would amount to what the civilised world likes to call oppression.
Kazakhstan is a good role model for that kind of thing. Dubai, Iran, India and Singapore have had their moments, too, in recent times.
Other countries allow the police and military to use striking workers as target practice, but even O’Leary would draw the line there.
And all of this ignores the principle of the right to strike — a freedom that was long-fought-for and hard-won.
Like any freedom, it is open to abuse — and attracts abuse. The minute the French air traffic controllers pulled off their headphones last Tuesday, their bare ears must have been burning from the criticisms of the perks and privileges of their pampered public-service existence.
Without doubt, they are well-paid — averaging €100,000 annually — and they work a shorter week than the average serf, albeit with greater responsibilities and more stressful circumstances.
At the moment, they’re opposing budget cuts ahead of a planned restructuring of air traffic management across Europe, which would create a single airspace for the entire region, unfettered by national boundaries, allowing for the streamlining of domestic air traffic control units.
There are arguments for and against the plan, but, at the back of it all, the French controllers probably just want to preserve their own jobs, protect their conditions, and ensure security in their retirement. Self-interest? Yes. Criminal offence? Non.
But if it’s neither practical nor desirable to outlaw strikes, it’s equally impractical and undesirable to have strikes deprive the public of essential services.
So, what’s to be done?
There is scope to make better use of industrial-relations and dispute-resolution mechanisms, and there is scope to make those mechanisms better.
Enterprise Minister Richard Bruton intends leading the way on this issue, at home, as he detailed in his ambitious Legislating For A World-Class Workplace Relations Service document of two years ago.
The actual legislating part is dragging on a bit, with drafting of the accompanying Workplace Relations Bill still very much a work-in-progress.
But Bruton is super-enthusiastic about its potential for nurturing harmonious employer-employee relations, defusing potential disputes, and facilitating swift resolution where disagreements do arise.
So it will be interesting to see if the Government gives it a vote of confidence by accepting last month’s Council of Europe ruling that gardaí should be given the right to join trade unions, and, by consequence, the right to strike.
The official word is that the ruling is still under consideration, with Ministers acutely aware that it not only has implications here, but possibly for other EU member states.
It could even prevent discussion about banning strikes by air traffic controllers from getting off the ground.
Ryanair won’t be happy with that thought and passengers with ruined travel plans won’t be comforted, either.
But there is an important ideological question at the heart of all this.
Is it more important to safeguard public services or protect people’s freedoms? The answer may well depend on how long you’ve spent cross-legged on a departure lounge floor in recent days, but you can regain sensation in a cramped limb a lot quicker than you can regain a lost liberty.
