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PAL flights remain normal

Direct News Source

10-Dec-2010 Philippine Airlines (PAL) assures its passengers that all PAL flights are normal and continue to operate according to published schedules.

Pronouncements made by the PAL Employees Association (PALEA) that they will stage a strike during the holidays reveal their intention to sow panic and anxiety to thousands of PAL passengers who have firmed up travel plans to spend Christmas with their loved ones.

PAL would like to assure the public the airline is doing all it can to prevent any flight disruptions. In the unlikely event of a work stoppage, PAL has the following contingency measures in place:

  1. engage professional service providers, including inflight catering companies, to augment workers not joining the strike;
  2. deploy all available manpower, including supervisors and managers who are more than capable of manning critical frontline posts;
  3. endorse affected passengers to our sister-airline, AirPhilexpress, as well as 134 international airline partners.

Employees who participated in a recent PALEA strike vote are ground workers mostly assigned at the ground-handling, catering and call center offices.

While their jobs are important, these workers play support to flight operations. They are not directly engaged in flying or maintaining the aircraft. The pilots, cabin crew and mechanics/maintenance workers of Lufthansa Technik Philippines are NOT part of the planned work stoppage.

The PAL-PALEA labor dispute is currently being reviewed by Malacanang. PAL hopes the union will heed Executive Secretary Paquito Ochoa's appeal to exercise restraint by deferring any mass action at this time and allow the Palace to decide on the case.

PAL said legal avenues can still be exhausted in resolving the management-labor differences.