The pilots' strikes and damage suits

By all indications, the PAL management is either too lucky or is really standing on sound legal basis in its manner of human resources management and labor relations. Recently, PAL has been winning in all its labor cases before the DOLE, the Office of the President, the Supreme Court, and just a week or two ago, before the Court of Appeals. Or perhaps, a more plausible explanation for these series of legal victories, is that PAL is being managed by highly competent corporate executives and expert business and HR managers, backed up by highly-paid, topnotch legal luminaries and consultants with strong connections and high degree of expertise in labor and industrial relations laws and jurisprudence. 

 PAL has gotten a legal imprimatur of its outsourcing program, over the objections of its ground personnel union, the PALEA, not once but for four times, twice by DOLE and twice by Malacañang. And then, the Court of Appeals last month, issued a ruling that approved PAL’s damage suit against its pilots’ union, the ALPAP. This is another landmark victory for Mr. Lucio Tan. Earlier, in this column, we commented that Mr. Tan is the only business tycoon in our country, who got a favorable High Court ruling, that gave imprimatur to its unprecedented 10-year CBA moratorium, the first and only such scheme in the history of Philippine labor relations.

 In another favorable ruling last month, penned by Justices Ramon Cruz, Jose Reyes, Jr, and Antonio Villamor, the Court of Appeals upheld the PAL’s move to sue the union of pilots for P730M damages. The suit arose from ALPAP’s 22-day strike in 1998, which then totally paralyzed both the domestic and international operations of the nation’s flag carrier. The pilots allegedly made the strike very damaging to PAL, by  allegedly abandoning  a number of its airplanes in some foreign airports, thereby causing tremendous demurrage  fees,  fines and  other costs to management, and the related  cost of getting replacement pilots to bring home those planes. 

 The actual and moral damages inflicted on management resulted to the eventual retrenchment of some 5000 ground personnel and other employees, and the dismissals of many pilots. In most of the litigations that were filed by the parties against each other, PAL expectedly, must have  spent a lot of money in attorney’s fees and litigation expenses. Nonetheless, it won most of these cases. On 29 August 2002, no less than the Supreme Court declared that the pilots’ act in abandoning the PAL aircrafts in various foreign airports was patently illegal. PAL earlier filed a complaint for damages against ALPAP, the pilots’ union,but the Labor Arbiter dismissed it for alleged lack of jurisdiction and for reason that at that time, the action was not yet ripe for filing. The arbiter’s ruling was affirmed by the NLRC. 

 But the Court of Appeals reversed the decision last month, and held that PAL’s action for damages could forthwith proceed against the union. This appellate court ruling has given impetus to the airline management’s advocacy for the rule of law, perhaps, to our mind, not so much to exact  money from ALPAP but more so, to send a strong message to any and  all unions and personnel, that may be inclined to take lightly the law and procedures in the exercise of the right to strike, and all workers’ rights, for that matter. ALPAP, by the way, is not a poor union. It owns multi-millions worth of buildings in the heart of Makati’s business district, and other valuable assets. And so, it has money to pay PAL in case it will lose this damage suit.

 As law professor for more than 27 years in UST, FEU, UE, this writer has written books, articles and columns on the laws and jurisprudence on strikes.  One of my articles on ILLEGAL STRIKES IN THE PHILIPPINES, was published by the Law Journals of both the UST and Ateneo, and is currently being serialized in the website via Google.  In said article, I stressed what Justice Panganiban held in the landmark  1999 case of  UST FACULTY UNION  versus BITONIO ( 318 SCRA 185), where it was postulated that “there is a right way to do the right thing at the right time by the right party for the right reason.” The Supreme Court held that what the pilots did was not right way to do the right thing.

The law provides that the commission of an illegal act during a strike, (whether the strike was by all appearances, legal)  may result to a judicial declaration of nullity of said strike if and when certain illegal acts were committed in the course thereof. This could be fatal to the union. The consequence may be far-reaching, to include loss of employment status  of the pilots and other strikers. And if there are actual and moral damages caused proximately by the acts of the union and the individual strikers, then the Court may order restitution to the offended party. In our system of laws, one’s right may not be exercised in a manner that does damage on another. Your right to swing your arms ends where my nose begins. That is the long and the short of it.