Cabin fever as Aer Lingus dispute brews

FOR almost a decade Aer Lingus passengers lived with the all-to-frequent threat of strikes as management tried to peel away legacy terms and conditions enjoyed by staff in order to create a leaner, more efficient airline able to compete with the likes of Ryanair.

Baggage handlers earning up to €110,000 or staff earning overtime for doing no work — these were the types of work practices which the airline said it needed to eradicate in order to keep itself from crashing out of existence.

After rolling out various cost-saving programmes, management succeeded in riding out storms of industrial relations unrest with relatively little disruption to passengers. In almost every dispute, third-party intervention staved off the action which could potentially have kept its whole fleet of planes grounded.

One of the clearest indications of the success of the Aer Lingus revamp was that it managed to fly out the other side of a global recession which might otherwise have proven fatal.

However, the process has yielded a staff-management relationship which is now frequently characterised as “toxic”. Every concession sought from staff, every change in work practices, is met with a wall of resistance. Staff representatives are accusing the company of communicating through diktat and threat and say the workers are now in the mood to fight back.

The headline issue this time around has been the decision by management to use agency cabin crew to man the airline’s new, more frequent transatlantic schedule. The airline had initially planned to wet lease Boeing 757 planes plus pilots for the service from leasing company ACL, but use its own cabin crew, mainly drawn from its Shannon compliment of 87.

However, at the start of last month it emerged Aer Lingus and cabin crew union Impact were at odds over the number of staff who should be put on each of the flights — Aer Lingus wanted four, Impact said at least five. As a result, Aer Lingus told the union it was instead going to use ACL cabin crew.

That decision led, at the end of October, to the company announcement that it is closing its Shannon base. It has told the 87 Shannon-based crew they can either relocate to Dublin or Cork or take voluntary severance. Otherwise, they face redundancy.

However, the closure of Shannon was far from the only reason the airline is now faced with potential strikes in the run-up to Christmas.

There were a number of other issues over which cabin crew were willing to take to the picket line, encouraged by their trade union branch.

For a number of years rosters have been a bone of contention between bosses and cabin crew.

According to the union, the timetables have become increasingly difficult with management forcing crew to work excessive shifts.

It says the published rosters are continually subject to radical changes, “leaving crew with little certainty over their working hours or home lives”. It says it realises some flexibility over rosters is necessary, but at Aer Lingus “onerous shift patterns and changing rosters have become systematic”.

Rostering was one of the elements of Greenfield, the airline’s efficiency scheme which delivered more than €100m in cost savings. According to Impact, a review of Greenfield brokered by the Labour Relations Commission in 2012 called for management and unions to sit down and work through a number of issues. However, Impact says management has cancelled and postponed a number of meetings and refused to table a position on many issues.

“We have been forced to conclude that the company has no intention of making progress on this review despite commitments made at the LRC,” it said. “The company has also slowed all other industrial relations procedures to a halt.

“It has become clear that the normal system of processing industrial relations issues affecting cabin crew has been effectively abandoned by management.”

In the background to all of this is the ongoing debacle over the pension scheme the airline shares with the Dublin Airport Authority. The scheme is almost €800m in deficit and an initial proposal to address the shortfall was not acceptable to the Pensions Board. Last month, the airline insisted it was not willing to raise its proposed contribution to the scheme. The likely outcome for staff in the scheme could be a fall in benefits of almost 25%.

As has been the case so many times before, it looks likely a third party mediation will be sought to try to end this dispute peacefully. To give passengers certainty particularly in the run-up to the busy Christmas period, that intervention needs to come as soon as possible.