Handling management grievances

Workers and clerical staff have unions, the C-suite has the decision-making powers, but how should the general cadres of white-collar managerial employees express their grievances?
This issue has been starkly highlighted over the last two months when some pilots of, first, Jet Airways and, this week, of Air India struck work over pay and allowances, holding air travellers to ransom country-wide. Much opprobrium has been heaped on them, the conventional view being that pilots, who would broadly correspond to mid-level managers in airlines, are obscenely overpaid and have no right to protest besides displaying a gross sense of irresponsibility.
The jury is still out on whether the pilots of India’s largest private and state-owned airlines have a legitimate case — the fact that both managements backed down doesn’t necessarily suggest the pilots were right. The bigger question, though, is this: if such a category of employees do think they have a valid grievance and if negotiations with senior management fail, how should they react? Is taking mass sick leave or simply not reporting to work — a strike by any other name as the Mumbai high court ruled in Jet’s case — a justified form of protest by people in positions of managerial responsibility, especially when their organisations are bleeding profusely?
The short answer from senior managers is that managerial staff who don’t agree with corporate policy are always free to leave or look elsewhere, a privilege blue-collar labour doesn’t enjoy. This is a fair argument in the kind of open labour market that India has become. Indeed, pilots have done just this in the past, exiting with alacrity from state-owned airlines to private competitors when the industry was booming; their protests now are an indicator of the dire straits in which the airline business finds itself.
01/10/09 Kanika Datta/Business Standard

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Categories: Indian Aviation- In General Oct 2009, Jet Airways Oct 2009, NACIL Oct 2009