Dirt cheap

How much is the price of humiliation? How much do you pay a mother, already saddled (or blessed?) with the raising of a special child, to make her endure the embarrassment of being forced off a flight since the child she is accompanying is “mentally ill”? (Never you mind whether the airline is successful in off-loading the passengers or not, let’s just focus on that process where the mother is forced to a position where she’s had to defend her child before airline staff, and their right to stay on that plane.)

Apparently, for Cebu Pacific airlines, public mortification and emotional suffering is only equivalent to a plane ticket.

Yes, that’s what the airline thinks it’s worth. After asking a mother (make that two different mothers) to get off the plane because their respective children weren’t exactly “up to par”, and because of an alleged policy that the plane can carry only one special child per flight, and only after being threatened with a lawsuit, the airline goes on television to offer them what they think is adequate compensation: Free tickets!

Yipee! Free tickets for a child who might not be able to use them anyway on that airline? Sounds like an excellent deal to me!

What I can’t get out of my mind is, how presumptuous the airline staff was in asking the mother (if they even asked) whether the child was special. Perhaps they had some special detecting device, much like a thermal scanner, that told them, ‘yup, this kid is below the accepted norms of ‘normalcy!’ (That could mean trouble for me next time I board a Cebu Pacific flight. Assuming I ever do.)

How did they approach the mothers? Did they ask, ‘Excuse me, but is he a retard?’ Or do they just flat out make the assumption, and act accordingly? Even just on this basis, I somehow cannot think this is acceptable behavior for anybody operating in the service industry.

And there’s also that darned policy of no two special children riding together, which the staff acted on and tried to enforce, and which the airline seems to be denying now. Is there such a policy or not? If there’s none, where did those staff members base their antics on? If there is, how does staff pick which special child should get offloaded? Do they implement some sort of first-special-child-to check-in, first-special-child to fly rule? Or whoever they think is going to be more a flight risk, gets dumped?

There are news reports saying that the airline’s policy is really, no two mentally ill persons should ride on the same flight, but that only makes it worse. That means, on that occasion, airline staff just assumed a child with Down’s syndrome was a mentally unstable passenger.

Cebu Pacific needs to rethink its policies. Or, even if as its mouthpiece says, there is no such policy, it needs to retrain its workforce to be more sensitive to the situation faced by special children and their caregivers. Even where Senator Pia Cayetano has already successfully pushed for a magna carta for children with disabilities, it seems our corporate citizens have yet to imbibe the standards that they’re supposed to adhere to. (The good Senator has another bill she’s pushing for these children, and it would be good if that gets passed, whether during this term or (crossing fingers!) on her next term.)

In the meantime, I wish those obviously distressed mothers the best of luck in pursuing their claims against Cebu Pacific, and forcing it to issue and enforce a policy that’s more protective of the rights of our special children. It’s too bad that sometimes, a lawsuit and its attendant negative publicity seems to be the only way of making big corporations effect change. 

And looking at who the retained counsel is for one such mother (and how expensive he usually is), it would be fair to say that a plane ticket might not exactly cut a deal.