Grievances: How should managers react?

Associations with board-level representation may sound radical but they aren't such a bad idea, writes Kanika Datta.

Workers and clerical staff have unions, the C-suite has the decision-making powers, but how should the general cadres of white-collar managerial employees express their grievances?

This issue has been starkly highlighted over the last two months when some pilots of, first, Jet Airways and, this week, of Air India struck work over pay and allowances, holding air travellers to ransom country-wide.

Much opprobrium has been heaped on them, the conventional view being that pilots, who would broadly correspond to mid-level managers in airlines, are obscenely overpaid and have no right to protest besides displaying a gross sense of irresponsibility.

In Jet Airways' case, the point was made with all the maudlin histrionics that Chairman Naresh Goyal had perfected during an earlier strike by cabin crew last year. This time, it was cabin and ground crew who held a press conference to beseech their pilot colleagues to abandon the sick-out and return to work.

Otherwise, they said, innocent employees, caught in the middle, would be in trouble if the airline lost revenue. The implication: the fat cats of the airline were ruining the livelihood of the toiling lesser mortals.

State-owned Air India played out the drama differently but characteristically with Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel, with an anxious eye to impending Assembly elections, telling the pilots to return or else - even as compromises were feverishly being worked out backstage.

The jury is still out on whether the pilots of India's largest private and state-owned airlines have a legitimate case - the fact that both managements backed down doesn't necessarily suggest the pilots were right.

The bigger question, though, is this: if such a category of employees do think they have a valid grievance and if negotiations with senior management fail, how should they react? Is taking mass sick leave or simply not reporting to work - a strike by any other name as the Bombay high court ruled in Jet's case - a justified form of protest by people in positions of managerial responsibility, especially when their organisations are bleeding profusely?

The short answer from senior managers is that managerial staff who don't agree with corporate policy are always free to leave or look elsewhere, a privilege blue-collar labour doesn't enjoy. This is a fair argument in the kind of open labour market that India has become.

Indeed, pilots have done just this in the past, exiting with alacrity from state-owned airlines to private competitors when the industry was booming; their protests now are an indicator of the dire straits in which the airline business finds itself.

It is telling that in the late eighties, union-style protests for higher pay by mid-level managers in the public sector proved signal failures precisely because of the lack of job mobility in those pre-liberalisation days.

Around the same time, a strike by Indian Airlines pilots on pay and perks failed for precisely the same reason.

One of the issues in the pilot-management clash in Jet Airways was over whether pilots had a right to form a union. They didn't, according to the airline's management, which provided it as an excuse not to negotiate - initially, that is; the stance changed later following the widespread havoc the strike created. Apparently, it was okay for the pilots to have a "welfare organisation" but not a grievances forum.

In an economy in which quality of talent counts for rather more than just manpower numbers, viewing the marketplace as an automatic grievance-correcting mechanism could boomerang on managements. Even if we assume that it is unseemly and undignified for managerial cadres to go on strike or haggle via employee unions, the truth is that middle managers remain uniquely disenfranchised.

This is hardly a healthy situation. Forget about the dire predictions about robots replacing middle managers on the shopfloor. In most organisations, despite successive bouts of "de-layering" and "right-sizing", middle management forms a critical element of the employee base - if not always in numbers, certainly in the nature of the work it performs.

In other words, it makes sense for CEOs to put in place more enlightened "protest management" mechanisms beyond the standard HR structures - to act as (a) early warning systems and (b) create a dignified, non-combative negotiation forum for its managerial cadres. Associations with board-level representation may sound radical but they aren't such a bad idea - after all, labour union leaders in the West are represented on corporate board, so why not middle managers. Some Scandinavian countries have experimented with such structures.

Management gurus, of course, will tell you that transparent decision-making is the ideal - but experience has shown that most corporations pay lip service to the concept.

IT companies, heavily dependent on talent as they move up the value chain, have cracked the system better than most.

For an emerging economy like India, such mechanisms could bridge the management deficit that is inevitable in family- and government-owned corporations that currently make up the vanguard of India's competitive advantage.