60 Years of Service

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محتوى الصفحة: Home > مجلة النقل الدولي "Transport International" > Issue 37 - October 2009 > 60 Years of Service

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Gabriel Mocho, Civil Aviation Secretary, looks back at the last 60 years of the section

The first conference of the Civil Aviation Section of the ITF was held in October 1949 when the jet-propelled civil aircraft was still a few years away and air travel for ordinary people was a prospect only a few visionaries could foresee.

60 Years of Service: Key Players
As the section celebrates its 60th anniversary, we spoke to some of the key players about the state of civil aviation and how the section has helped them

The ITF was recovering its activities after the Second World War and the aviation unions already affiliated thought that the ITF was “already railway-minded and sea-minded: let us make it also air-minded”, looking not only at working conditions but at safety.

From deregulation to fatigue: the issues for the ITF in recent years

1978 The airline deregulation act, under Jimmy Carter’s presidency, removed government control over fares, routes and market entry (of new airlines) from commercial aviation. This is where the whole drama of airline collapses and concession-CBAs starts.

1987 British Airways is privatised, starting a wave of privatisation among national carriers.

1988 A Pan Am jumbo jet from London to Heathrow is bombed, crashing on the town of Lockerbie in Scotland, killing 259 people on board as well as 11 people on the ground. The bombing has a major impact on aviation security.

1997 The Star Alliance comes into being, with founding partners Air Canada, Lufthansa, Scandinavian Airlines System, Thai Airways International, and United Airlines. This was the first airline alliance and the ITF responded by creating alliance groups.

1997 Disputes have featured throughout the six decades of the section’s existence, but this year was exceptional. A three-day cabin crew strike at British Airways and in the US plus a 15-day strike by 185,000 workers at UPS both delivered resounding victories on the back of unprecedented ITF solidarity and coordination.

2000 The Global Zero Air Rage Action Day on 6 July of this year was a milestone for effective, membership-led devolved campaigning. Through colourful, diverse, participative, and fun initiatives, workers and passengers came together in a common cause to tackle impunity.

2001 The atrocities of
11 September 2001 were also an economic and security calamity for aviation. The affiliates’ strategic response directly contributed to the landmark 2002 ILO tripartite aviation agreement (following failure in 1990) and underpinned a breakthrough for labour at the ICAO Conference on Air Transport Economic Regulation in 2003.

2005 The ITF holds its first ever aviation economics conference. As a result of this, the section starts to proactively work with fraternal organisations such as IFATCA and IFALPA, representing air traffic controllers and pilots respectively, and to seek global labour alliances in aviation.

2009 The ITF civil aviation section launches a study on fatigue in the aviation industry. This is the first ever global study of this calibre.

Compiled with the help of Stuart Howard, Shane Enright and Ingo Marowsky, former section secretaries.

The world of civil aviation in 1949 is not one that workers would recognise today. But over the next 60 years, scientific and technical progress made civil air transport a crucial part of the transport mix.

It was a constant challenge for the workers who had more to do as passenger numbers increased. Cockpits had five crew members, cabins had many cabin crew in small airplanes and there were hundreds of mechanics and ground-handlers. With no computers, airlines needed several administrative workers. All aviation staff were affected by the changes.

Technological progress has gone hand in hand with challenges for aviation staff and their working conditions. The introduction of the first jet aeroplane reduced travel time but because of longer nonstop flights increased flight and duty times for crew. Later, Concorde enabled airlines to fly from London to New York and return in one unprecedented shift. The Boeing 747 also dramatically changed the ratio between cockpit and cabin crews.

The real problem for aviation workers came at the end of the seventies with deregulation. Thousands of high quality jobs disappeared together with prestige airlines. Neoliberal policies promoted the notion that the best remedy for the problems of the industry was privatisation and outsourcing. History has proved this solution to be ineffective. According to an International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) study from 2005, too much liberalisation has led to the loss of control over safety,

The airline business has fragile financial margins and is highly dependent on the success of the economy overall. The consequences of wars, flu epidemics and terrorist attacks were used by employers to force workers and unions to make concessions on their collective agreements that had cost decades of struggle to achieve in a desperate intent to save their jobs.

Today, low-cost carriers push the boundaries of what workers and passengers will put up with. The likes of Ryanair push their workers to the limit in a quest to infinitely lower costs. The section’s groundbreaking study on fatigue shows that this is an extremely serious problem for our workers, and we have to fight back.

The current financial crisis and consequent recession is putting our economies, jobs and collective agreements in danger again. This is why the ITF, together with the International Labour Organization (ILO), is researching the impact of the financial crisis on civil aviation to analyze how unions are contesting this crisis and see if we can learn from the past crisis to be ready for future problems. Results from the study will be available by the end of this year.

The world of civil aviation is changing. The issue of climate change is bringing questions of sustainability to the fore. Unions need to start tackling these issues now, before it is too late. The labour movement must be in the fight for a just transition and for sustainable jobs. We cannot afford to be ignored.

We believe that workers can only be pushed so far in the eternal race to the bottom. Unions have always been forced to go along with the cost-cutting measures proposed by airline management. But enough is enough. There will always be one crisis or another in the aviation industry. Airlines will fail, business will fluctuate. We have to fight back. We can no longer accept that workers must bear the brunt of changes to the industry.

We’d like to thank our affiliates for the last 60 years and all their efforts on behalf of aviation staff everywhere.

الصفحة الرئيسية للأقسام:
Issue 37 - October 2009

صفحات أخرى لـ 60 Years of Service:
Key Players

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