Dialogue: Top-flight service takes a miserly hit

By GARTH GEORGE

Last week I wrote that among the companies which had suffered badly from Rogernomics and its derivatives was our national flag carrier, Air New Zealand. And I once again suggested that any company which treats its staff as a liability rather than an asset - which is more common than not in business and industry today - is doomed to fail.

The comment on Air NZ's execrable staff relations was based on correspondence I have had with a man who was an Air NZ flight attendant for more than 20 years.

He reckons that the question of whether the quality of Air NZ's inflight service today matches what it used to be - or that provided by its competition - can be easily determined by comparing the crews' employment conditions before and after the imposition of the now-superseded Employment Contracts Act passed by the National Government.

Until then, he says, flight crews had negotiated and won conditions that would have been numbered among the top five in the world. The crews were content and the service they provided superb.

Then came the Employment Contracts Act and with it, he says, came "an easy transformation to Banana Republic Airways - at once reducing those conditions to those endured in African states."

The agreement, which he said was "fittingly imposed on Air New Zealand crew on April 1, 1992," destroyed the working conditions of the flight crews. And he insists that, right from the outset, inflight service was the first to suffer.

Crew complements were unilaterally reduced - in some instances by 20 per cent - and hours of work were hugely increased at the same time. Sick leave was vastly reduced, and management issued threats about any imagined abuse.

Essential recovery time at home and overseas was also arbitrarily slashed, with no regard for the crews' health. And flight-time limitations were - quite appallingly - increased.

The standard and location of the crews' accommodation at overseas destinations - once the subject of mutual agreement - was put at management discretion, and, as a result, the standard and location of the crew hotels slumped dramatically.

Crew expenses - for meals and essentials while away - were also vastly reduced to the point that they didn't meet crew members' realistic needs. Let my informant tell the story:

"With this knowledge, management quite incredibly actually advised crew in writing as to which foodstuffs they might purchase and export from New Zealand in order to cook and eat it in their rooms. For this the crew would have to supply their own cooking utensils because the hotel rooms provided contained none.

"With good cause, unknowing Virgin Airlines' crews referred to their Air New Zealand counterparts as 'the Muesli Miseries'."

But one of the worst results, he says, was the arrival of something previously unknown in the company - back-stabbing.

"This began and was actively encouraged by management. Many unfounded adverse reports on fellow employees are common now - often written by the most junior of crew members about the most senior. It is yet another situation providing disenchantment and alienation."

Thus, he insists, today's poor inflight service is a direct and traceable result of the Employment Contracts Act.

Which, of course, is not strictly true. There are a number of companies whose staff relations did not deteriorate with the passing of that atrocious act. They continued to treat their staff as their most valued asset and, as a result, have continued to do well.

The act simply provided the means for unscrupulous employers to exploit their staff, something many of them were only too willing to do and would have done years earlier had the law not made it too difficult.

The chasm between capital and labour is as old as mankind itself, and will remain an unbridgeable gap until the end of time. And unfortunately, the good faith on which our latest employment law is based is an ideal which has always been and remains unattainable.

Put simply, capital wants minimum costs, maximum output and maximum profits; labour wants as much money a person as possible for as little time and effort as possible. Such is human nature - and it ain't going to change.

But in spite of that, the fact remains: businesses which treat their staff liberally and fairly, and whose staff respond with loyalty and increased productivity, invariably do much better than those that don't.

Meanwhile, perhaps passengers on Air NZ might pack a few sammies to share with the crew.

* garth_george@herald.co.nz

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