W

e don’t even dare to think about such a dire possibility. But the mere threat by the Garuda Pilots Association to go on a strike on Thursday morning unless the management fulfills their demand for salary parity with foreign pilots hired by the national flag-carrier is still quite alarming.

Just look at how Garuda shares on the stock market, already languishing at 50 percent below their primary offer price, have declined in the last few days.

As Garuda is the country’s largest airline, which serves international and domestic destinations, even a one-day strike, as planned by the association, would cause traffic chaos with numerous flight delays and possibly many outright cancellations.

Garuda employees should fully realize that the key parameter for an airline’s performance is service reliability as measured by the safety and punctuality of its flight services. Once this record is tainted, the impact on its service reliability and, consequently, its corporate image, would be adverse.

A strike would severely affect all the spectacular progress Garuda employees and the management have painstakingly gained over the past five years.

Garuda has made a fantastic turnaround, winning many international service awards, booking handsome profits and capping all these by listing its shares on the Jakarta stock market early this year.

Would Garuda pilots be willing to take the risk of throwing away all these achievements?

Garuda pilots have a legitimate reason to be disillusioned with the more than 50 percent disparity between their basic salaries and those of the foreign pilots hired on an annual working contract. The labor law also guarantees their right to strike as a measure to strengthen their bargaining power with the management.

But a work strike is supposed to be deployed only as a last-resort measure in case of a permanent deadlock of negotiations.

We don’t think the pilots and the management have exhausted all avenues of negotiations to resolve the issues around the perceived salary disparity.

True, Garuda’s management should be blamed for its mistake of being so carelessly sloppy in planning its cockpit crew development to meet the pace of its fleet expansion.

More than two dozen jetliners joined its fleet last year alone, and this expansion will continue to turn Garuda from an 87-jetliner airline into a 153-jetliner airline in 2015.

The mistake has forced the management to hire foreign pilots as a temporary measure to meet its bigger need for cockpit crew until its in-house training and other domestic pilot training schools are able to fill the gap.

The dilemma, though, is that the management will not be able to get good pilots from the international market if it is not willing to offer attractive remuneration packages.

But the Garuda Pilots Association should look at the problem in its full perspective. Garuda, under its contingency program, hired only 34 foreign pilots, or a mere 4 percent of its total cockpit crew of 897 pilots.

As in most other companies, expatriate employees usually ask for bigger salaries than their national counterparts as compensation for their working far away from their home countries and their short-term contracts.

After all, the basic pay of Garuda national pilots, though nominally about 50 percent lower than that of the foreign pilots, is still fairly handsome at about US$60,000 a year, not including fringe benefits, bonuses and other social allowances. That income level is comfortably high in a country with an annual per capita income of less than $3,000.

Hence, it is rather commercially unfeasible now for Garuda pilots to demand full salary parity with foreign pilots, whose job tenures will end within a year because, as permanent employees, they also enjoy other fringe benefits, such as bonuses, pensions, allowances etc., which are not given to contractual workers.