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AFAP Commits Suicide
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The latter half of calendar year 1989 will go down in Australian history as the period when the nation’s single strongest and most successful union, the Australian Federation of Air Pilots, literally committed industrial suicide.
And we don’t say strongest and most successful lightly. Without doubt the AFAP and its predecessor, the Australian Air Pilots Association, had won every industrial challenge that they had embarked upon over their 43 year history. What the AFAP wanted, or demanded, it got- it was as simple as that! There was never any question as to whether or not it would succeed in its claims against the airlines, it was simply a matter of estimating how many days it would take the airlines to cave in to the AFAP’s demands. Indeed, the AFAP held industrial muscle that was the envy of unions such as the notorious BLF. Never had the Federation been beaten as they always knew they held the trump card. Without the pilots the airline was grounded, full stop!
One remembers well the ominous speech (for the employer at least) made following one of the AAPA’s first major industrial breakthroughs in 1954 when the then president, the legendary Captain R Holt stated: “If we wish at any time to use the considerable power that we hold in the airline industry, we are a force with which any group of employers must reckon . . . We need members to stiffen their backbones, and thereby stiffen that of the Association . . . if all our conditions have not been met, we will simply go on strike and stay there until they are. Ha! some of you will say, this is illegal, red, unprecedented-etc, we will be outside Court, we will be unpopular, we will throw people out of work, and so on; but let me point out that . . . almost no organisation ever got anywhere without one . . . Let us encourage contributors to a special fund to fight this action. Let us encourage Captains . . . to give up to the fund the tax free portion of their margins’ increase . . . Let us fight and fight with the attitude that ‘Attack is the only Defence’, and let us not retreat one inch on any form of bargaining after the strike conditions have been finally laid down by our executive. “(Taken from Nicholas Blain’s excellent book, Industrial Relations
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