Alitalia pilots

The Italian government has stepped into the negotiations between CAI, the new Compagnia Aerea Italiana and Italy's nine airline unions in a last-ditch attempt to avoid the total dismantling of Alitalia, the country's failing flagship airline. The mediation attempt came after Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi yesterday said he would personally get involved, blaming political opponents on the left for encouraging the unions to scuttle the agreement.

        Berlusconi’s charges seem unlikely because all three umbrella unions have urged the workers to accept the plan and because the major parties in the center-left would be really irresponsible if they wanted 20,000 people to be out of work merely in the hopes that the current government would find itself in a difficult situation. Berlusconi has to intervene because a failure of the rescue attempt would be a very black mark on the new government’s record and because the failure of the last rescue attempt  - last spring's takeover offer by Air France-KLM – can be squarely laid on his own personal doorstep.

         The problem for the last ditch negotiators is that the unions involved in  the contract talks, in particular the pilots and the flight crews, say they  cannot accept the contract terms offered which involve fairly drastic job cuts and significant wage reductions. Italy’s airline unions bear a lot of the blame for Alitalia’s drastic situation; over the years  there have been too many strikes and many unreasonable demands. But in effect the conditions set by the new company – 18 investors who have been allowed to buy Alitalia’s assets but have been allowed not to take over its debts, which will be paid for by the taxpayer – are too draconian.

         CAI (pronounced kai, to rhyme with my) started out by asking that all previous labor contracts be cancelled and that all airline and airport workers be covered by a single contract which in Italy would  be unprecedented. It asked flight personnel to take a 30% cut in salary and shorter vacations, demands which given the situation are probably reasonable. But it also wanted to wipe out all seniority, which is unheard of,  and to reduce the indemnity to in-flight work to a miserable 1.5 euros and hour. Not even two dollars.

        As for the pilots, they say they can except pay cuts (they are asking CAI to set a pay average which is somewhere between that of the richest and smallest airlines. But they say they cannot accept 1000 job cuts out of a total of 2,500 pilots (the Air France plan would have eliminated only 500 pilot jobs). 

        The pilots and flight attendants are also worried that the new owners, who have pledged to hold onto their shares for five years (some analysts believe that after that time a foreign airline will step in to buy Alitalia) are cutting back too many routes and eliminating too many planes (80 is the number planned) which they say means that Alitalia, with only 150 or so planes, will lose market share that it may never be able to get back.