Getting back in the air

With any luck, Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) is gradually going to resume what passes for normal operations, with the strike called by its employee unions finally coming to an end. A range of pressures from outraged passengers who found their tickets worthless to a government that appeared obdurate and invoking the Essential Services (Maintenance) Act 1952, conflated to bring about a partial resumption of work. The government and the unions are meeting in an attempt to repair the damage — lives were lost in a still unexplained shooting incident involving striking workers — and move to a position where restructuring of PIA, in whatever format, can go ahead.



There have been innumerable attempts to right the wrongs of an airline that is desperately overstaffed, inefficiently managed and even today used as a tool of political preferment. With the payroll now at over 700 personnel per aircraft and the government haemorrhaging billions every month to prop up the national carrier, it is obvious that cuts have to be made somewhere, whether PIA is privatised or not. The government wants to sell off a percentage of the stake. The unions see that as the thin end of the wedge, and as has been witnessed, are vehemently opposed to this. The Engineering Division of the airline that keeps the aircraft airworthy and to international standards of safety holds the trump card. If the engineers say there is ‘no fly’, then there is no fly and who can gainsay them? By mid-afternoon on February 10, the leader of the PIA staff union was quoted as saying that he was satisfied with the way the initial talks with the Punjab chief minister had gone, but the matter is far from resolved.

A spark of light has been provided by PIA announcing a halving of fares, which had skyrocketed as soon as the strike took hold, and is doubtless designed to bring back those passengers forced to use other carriers. The airline lost its chairman at the height of the strike and it is not going to be easy to attract a person of the necessary competencies to turn things round, and as elsewhere in a country wracked by industrial disputes, competencies are no less deficient on the government side.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 11^th,  2016.

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