Reminds me of the time when LKY came down hard on ALPA-S (Airline Pilot Assocaition). I got this from another site
http://sgforums.com/forums/10/topics/71494
SM's meeting with pilots: What happened at the Istana
By Zuraidah Ibrahim
'You play straight with me, I play straight with you. You play ducks and drakes with me, I play ducks and drakes with you.' -- SM Lee Kuan Yew
AS THE guests stepped into the pristine hallways of the Istana last Thursday afternoon, it was clear from their expectant faces that they were not there on one of those routine diplomatic goodwill visits.
This was no courtesy call.
The 14 Singapore Airlines pilots - a carefully selected mix of unionists ousted from leadership last November and their successors - were first ushered into a drawing room.
Some sat armed with files. Others waited with folded arms. Eventually, they were shepherded up to the chandelier-draped Sheares Room. Several paused at the bottom of the stairs, staring curiously through glass doors into a roomful of journalists.
Upstairs, they were about to face the man who had served them a series of public rebukes over the past few months.
He was after 'the principals and the ringleaders' behind the ouster of the union leadership, he had said.
'If they play this game, there will be broken heads,' he said on another occasion.
'Think carefully,' he cautioned them later, suspecting that the pilots were on a collision course with management.
That Thursday afternoon, Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew began with an explanation.
'I decided to take up this issue since I've been involved with Singapore Airlines from the start,' he said.
In case the pilots needed reminding, he pointed out that it was he who had secured the pact for SIA's first and most lucrative route then to London. It was he who had asked for Changi to be built, despite expert studies favouring Paya Lebar. It was he who had seen the airline through its turbulent early years.
'So,' he said, 'I have no intention for it to go down'.
If the pilots had anticipated facing an uncompromising force, they were right.
But if they had feared that this determination would extend to siding completely with SIA's management, they were wrong.
Instead, he gave his word, several times, that SIA management would be put right.
'There will be no sacred cows,' he said, meaning this clearing of the way of past agreements and positions would probably apply equally to the union as it would to management.
In the two-hour exchange that followed, he also gave them a tutorial on industrial relations, what it meant to be an effective union, and the importance of non-confrontational, cooperative labour-management relations within Singapore's formula for success.
He came to power on the back of union support, he recounted to those in need of a history lesson. As a lawyer new to politics, he had done work for unions for free. His pro-union credentials were as unimpeachable as his pro-business record, he appeared to be saying.
But what he could not countenance was an adversarial relationship that could bring Singapore down.
Thus, he reasoned with the delegation, to win their minds rather than break their heads.
First, however, there was a reading of the riot act to one Captain Ryan Goh.
The master politician was at work.
You were the prime mover, were you not, behind the machinations to vote against the union leadership, he asked.
This, even though you were on the very council of the Air Line Pilots Association-Singapore (Alpa-S)?
That fateful ouster was what had brought the pilots that afternoon to the Istana.
Alpa-S - which guards jealously its status as an independent union that stays out of the tripartite loop - booted out its leaders after rueing the wage cuts that they had accepted and members had earlier endorsed.
The pilots agreed to the lower pay during the Sars outbreak when the airline was bleeding. But after it made a stunning turnaround a quarter later, a whispering campaign began about the union being weak. The larger battle ahead - negotiating a new collective agreement then in its last days - needed stronger stomachs, the sentiment went.
Reading from a file, Mr Lee pulled out the following facts about Captain Goh.
A Malaysian with permanent residence status here, he had accepted Australian PR in 2002, moved his wife and children to Perth, shipped his car and sold his flat.
You told someone from IE Singapore that the grass had stopped growing in Singapore, did you not, he asked.
He turned to one of the pilots and asked if he knew the Malaysian had bought a house in Australia and had this option to bail out.
No, the person answered.
'No?' repeated Mr Lee.
'That's deception, isn't it?' he asked Capt Goh.
The pilot in the hot seat tried to defend himself but it was too late. The line in the sand between him and the Singaporeans had been drawn for him.
'My daughter is still in school here,' he tried saying, adding this showed he still had roots in Singapore.
But wasn't that because she did not like school in Australia and came back, Mr Lee shot back calmly.
Silence.
The castigation, no doubt a tactic of divide-and-rule, also established a more significant point: It is not up to PRs or other foreigners to get into union matters and play around with decisions that affect the rest of Singaporeans.
Capt Goh had tried to undermine the interests of SIA and Singapore, he said. 'If Singapore goes down, you go down,' he told the Singaporeans across the table. 'He doesn't go down.'
With that out of the way, he laid out what he wanted to achieve out of the meeting: a fresh start.
'You play straight with me, I play straight with you. You play ducks and drakes with me, I play ducks and drakes with you,' he told them.
'Tell me whether we can cooperate.'
Yes, they could tell him one thing and act another way, but he was not interested in that.
'I don't hold you to blame for everything. Nor is the management responsible for all the things that have gone wrong. 'I want to create a new partnership of trust and cooperation, not confrontation,' he said.
The pilots needed to understand what was at stake. When members ousted their leaders, their actions jarred and suggested they were clueless about the environment they operated in: An economy on the remake trying to ease its cost pressures and an aviation industry that will be forever changed by the wringer it went through these last few years.
SIA did not need hostile industrial relations that would weigh it down at a time when the connectivity that the airline and Changi provided was facing intense competition. Without that connectivity that other parts of the economy were premised upon, Singapore would suffer.
'So it puzzles me. Pilots are intelligent people. How is it you are out of touch?' he asked rhetorically.
It was partly because, someone had told him, he said, pilots were out of the country half the time. Partly also, they were out of the know because they were not under the National Trades Union Congress, which would have kept members apprised of the slightest twitch of its trouble-on-the-horizon barometer.
Whatever the case, he set the parameters for future moves.
All National Wages Council recommendations must be accepted if the airline was to achieve flexibility and nimbleness to outlast the competition.
Wages would have to be as variable as possible. Profit-sharing must factor in return on capital. Retrenchment benefits must be capped at 25 years. Medical benefits would no longer be fully paid for, a bitter pill almost all Singaporean workers have already swallowed, some as far back as a decade ago.
But all these changes did not mean the pilots were being sold down the river. They will be paid market rates and when there are extras, they will get more, he explained.
'Now, I want to hear what you have to say,' he said after an hour.
Over the next, the pilots vented their grievances, imploring for understanding.
Captain Mok Hin Choon, the new president of Alpa-S, said the company had to reflect and see if it could bring along its people, pointing out that even its NTUC-related unions were unhappy.
'Trust has been missing for the last few years,' he said, adding that 'it takes two hands to clap'.
Out of the bag leapt their biggest bugbear - the overseas-based pilots. The company kept rebuffing their proposals to relook the scheme which they said was inefficient, wasteful and resulted in rostering that left them with scraps while their overseas counterparts cherry-picked the juicier routes.
Flight operations was in charge, came the reply, when Mr Lee asked who was behind it all if they were right about the matter.
'If all this is true, then the flight operations must be blind or stupid! ... I want an explanation from them because I cannot believe this,' he said.
'You give me a paper, I will look at it.'
He promised the human resources of the airline would be revamped and urged the pilots to give new chief executive officer Chew Choon Seng a chance.
As trust was rebuilt, there should be more information sharing so both sides could work together.
They told him 38 pilots had left in recent months. Where were they going, he wanted to know.
There will be changes, he said.
'I am assuring you that the Government will make sure that SIA acts in good faith,' he said.
Mr Lee went on to answer one of the main questions on the minds of Singaporeans: Why did the Government need to intervene in an internal company matter? 'We are the majority owners and we will ensure that they act in the interest of the country, and the interest of the country requires cooperation, trust and confidence from the unions.'
Why did it have to be the Senior Minister?
As he explained it, he had dealt with the airline from the beginning, it was fair he saw to it that the restive relationship between the pilots in the early years still continuing today, end.
But he was also realistic enough to concede this much: The residual feelings of suspicion would still be there.
Capt Mok too made this plain enough when he told the media later Alpa-S was not ready to embrace NTUC.
But yes, he and the others pledged to work on a clean slate, work in partnership with management and give things a go. They would use the negotiations for the new collective agreement as a time for trust-building.
By the end of it, it felt as if the fog of suspicion that had settled between Government and Alpa-S these past months had a good chance of lifting.
As the press walked in at the tail end of the meeting and posed questions, Captain Mok insisted on looking forward, vowing to make a clean start.
Details of difficulties with management? No, he wasn't keen on hitting the headlines with that.
Details of demands? No, not keen either.
Management should thank him for closing the books thus.
The meeting ended with handshakes all around, even with the solemn-looking Capt Goh.
If there was any sense of deja vu in the room, Captain Freddie Koh must have felt it most.
He was among a posse of union pilots Mr Lee summoned to the Istana in 1980 for daring to fan a go-slow action to vent their disgruntlement over pay and work conditions.
He told them then in unvarnished language: 'I do not want to do you in but I will not let anyone do Singapore in.'
When trouble with Alpa-S began, Mr Lee said he wanted to clean up on the restiveness that was resurfacing. 'This is a job that has to be finished and I'll finish it.'
Thursday afternoon moved towards that conclusion.
Looking back, throughout it all, the Senior Minister in effect employed the familiar strategy of good cop, bad cop. Except that he played both roles.
Now that he and the Government have said their piece and the pilots have made peace, SIA needs to break its deafening silence. Soon.
The tremendous influence in dictating the terms and conditions by which salaries and perks are laid down can be seen from here. There was no effort made to control the pay received by the top honchos in the GLC's, whether any were successful or otherwise. Some GLC's went down spectacularly whilst others trudge along barely surviving whilst some of them are successful. Example of one that has been trudging for umpteen years was NOL. One that went down was Chartered Industries and the successful one is SASCO.
Whether successful or otherwise the top echelons received extremely generous wages, whilst those in the lower rungs are paid normal wages. It serves the purpose to ensure the direct control of the wealth of the country are in the hands of a few. The result of this policy is that private businesses will also follow suit and the government then raise the stakes even higher.
The peasants has to put a stop to this spiraling wage gap as it is becoming uncontrollable especially in the coming months where most nations are in danger of being bankrupt.
