Soft landing for controllers

The arbitration ruling drawn up by the former Labor Minister Manuel Pimentel, defining the new collective bargaining agreement for Spanish air traffic controllers, may at last be the starting point for a definitive normalization of a professional sector that for decades has existed in a permanent state of exception, as the National High Court once termed it. The ruling is a binding one, but a frank acceptance of it on both sides would be a good sign, given that the controllers have recently been capable, without previous warning or any official call for a strike, of bringing air traffic to a halt during a major public holiday in December.

The damage this challenge did to the government's prestige- when, for the first time since the Franco regime, it had to declare a state of alert, and militarize the control towers- is now compensated by a collective bargaining agreement which, in its main lines, consolidates what the government itself implemented by decree in February of last year: a working timetable of 1,670 hours annually (against the 1,200 of previous years) with a slight further reduction in the future, and an average salary of 200,000 euros(against a previous 350,000 euros). In this way the controllers' working conditions are brought more into line with those of their European colleagues: losing a part of the privileges they enjoyed, such as remunerated retirement at the age of 52, and the power to organize their own working schedule and train new controllers.

What may be interpreted as a success for the government is also a clear sign that the general reform of airport management now underway is indispensable, and that AENA (the state airport-administration agency) must shoulder its responsibility as a manager of this essential public service.

The wildcat strike in December broke out when dozens of controllers considered that they had, by that time of the year, already covered their 1,670 hours. Pimentel has exceptionally extended the existing timetable from now to 2013, a time by which such problems are expected to have been solved thanks to, among other measures, private management-control services and newly trained controllers who, in passing, will weaken the existing union's capacity for blackmail. The ruling also demonstrates the union's irresponsibility, since it must now accept something that was recently the motive for a mass wildcat strike.

Hopefully the ruling will put an end to the histrionic gestures that have been seen on both sides in the past. It is unacceptable for 2,300 workers to put a democratic government, and a whole country, in a corner on account of their pay-and-conditions demands. Nor is it acceptable for a government to resort to measures as drastic as a state of alert in an industrial dispute. This agreement must be complemented by the already-planned reforms and, on the part of the authorities, by a firm determination to enforce the law and the collective bargaining agreement. The latter should include following through with the disciplinary proceedings initiated against 430 controllers- which, in any other professional group, would already have resulted in more than a few firings.