Fight or flight? A striking question
The threat of an Air New Zealand strike grounding the peak day of Christmas travel, December 21, is less a case of unions being able to say to the public ‘‘now that we have your attention’’ than ‘‘now that we have your instant enmity’’.
The notice served by maintenance engineers, aircraft logistics and related staff is clearly a bargaining chip. People get that. But who wouldn’t be immediately spooked by the horrendous thought of Christmas travel disruptions? Being one of 42,000 people trying to rebook?
When nurses and teachers have taken action, the public has been paying at least some attention beforehand; and perhaps factoring their own longstanding experiences and observations into the mix.
Fairly or not, when you inject people with an adrenalised jolt of alarm followed by gnawing worry, they aren’t likely to be feeling all that open-mindedly analytical about the rights and wrongs of the dispute at hand.
Far more vivid will be the sense of sheer cruelty over the timing. Of their worries being stoked as negotiational currency.
Those who take even a cursory look at what’s being offered and sought will in many cases see deals better than their own. The airline says the average income of these staff is $115,000 and about 170 earn more than $150,000. Granted, that’s out of nearly 1000 workers, and averages can mask real unfairnesses for many people at one end of the spectrum. (It’s the old line: when you and Bill Gates are in a lift, the average income of you both is spectacularly good. Not that you’re any richer.)
Still, on those figures, not a lot of New Zealanders will be minded to rush and console the airline elves, vital though their work is for public safety.
Rather than placing heat on the company, public anxieties will focus sour attention on the unions in the first instance, and the Government in the second.
The Government has particularly tender skin in this game. For starters, we as taxpayers still own the largest chunk of our national carrier.
More acutely, one of this Government’s real political vulnerabilities is the increasingly damaging impression that it is, itself, a flint for strikes.
There’s a scene from The West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin’s earlier film The American President that seemed minor and misplaced.
President (Michael Douglas): You know I studied under a Nobel prize-winning economist, and you know what he taught me?
Chief of Staff (Martin Sheen): Never have an airline strike at Christmas?
The question didn’t even need an answer; the administration swung into action as a matter of pure imperative. And the whole crisis-in-themaking was resolved off-camera, raising the question what on earth the point of it was.
But it did serve its dramatic purpose. When the plot needed an uncomplicated complication – something that in an already busy storyline instantly and unassailably cut through other issues to add stress to characters by creating the spectre of an intolerable risk – a Christmas airline strike was the very thing.
Here in real life, it still is.
Rather than placing heat on the company, public anxieties will focus sour attention on the unions in the first instance, and the Government in the second.