Daily Times

Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) employees called off their strike after the government met one of their three demands and announced the removal of managing director Aijaz Haroon. The other two demands are withdrawal of the memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Turkish Airlines (TA) for codesharing and reinstatement of the sacked employees. During the four days of strike, the airline sustained a loss of four billion rupees and about 25,000 passengers were affected. It is pertinent to ask if the government had to ultimately capitulate to the strikers’ demand, why did it let the situation deteriorate to this level. One expected sagacity and foresight from politicians, assumed to be astute negotiators, sitting at the helm of affairs. Timely action could have saved the national flag carrier further loss of reputation and customers from avoidable torment. It remains to be seen how the government deals with the other two demands of the PIA employees.

On the face of it, the terms of the deal being negotiated with the TA are detrimental to the market profile of the PIA. The PIA employees had serious reservations against surrendering of some of the most profitable routes used by Pakistani expatriates to the TA in a deal crafted by its managing director. Although the government has denied that any agreement had been signed with the TA, there are credible news reports that negotiations were underway for such an arrangement and an MoU had already been signed. Apparently, the managing director had not taken the employees on board in the decision making process, hence the build up of resentment against him. As far as the reinstatement of the sacked employees is concerned, the government would need to make tough decisions because PIA’s employees-to-seat ratio is among the highest in the world. Political considerations rather than merit govern the recruitment policy of PIA, hence the overstaffing. Either it should stop new recruitments and gradually decrease staff with the retirement of old employees or it should make the economy cuts where there is flab without hurting the marketing profile of the airline. PIA has suffered a steep decline in its service standards over the past few years and has lost the trust of the customers for reliability. Without taking hard decisions and necessary measures to run it along corporate lines, annual injections of money from the national exchequer cannot rescue the sinking ship of PIA. *