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crew members were overweight and we tried to enforce a fitness regimen for the cabin crew, the AICCA protested. When, consequently, overweight crew members began to be grounded, the union asked its members to boycott weight checks, even though they had signed an agreement that allowed for it. Their reasoning was bizarre—they blamed the management for not providing gym facilities close to the crew member’s place of stay. When crew members failed the refresher courses that were conducted regularly to upgrade skills, the AICCA asked its members to stop going for them. The union would not even allow the pilots to check the crew’s knowledge of safety features on board an aircraft. In addition, while the crew of all airlines, including the Indian Airlines, wore name tags, the AICCA opposed this on the specious plea that passengers would contact and harass air hostesses at hotels abroad if they knew their names.
    In the first year, I faced the brunt of this irresponsible and wilfully destructive behaviour of the union leaders. The AICCA tied up the airline in an endless series of knots by issuing directives that hindered the routine working of the airline and destroyed the morale of the people involved. The union’s directives were like commands that could not be ignored or overruled by the crew or the management. The slightest deviation could mean a flight being grounded or the launch of an indefinite non-cooperation with the management. And if a crew member dared disobey the orders, he or she would be harassed till they either toed the line or apologised. The union refused to see reason or face the reality of a market that was moving away from Air India.
    Consider some of the directives to see how unreasonable they were. The one issued on 21 December 1993, for instance, said that crew members could go on leave at any time. They would not have to give advance notice and, by implication, could walk out of a flight at the very last minute. This directive, when seen in the context of an earlier agreement, which said that a flight was not allowed to take off without a full crew complement, ensured that the unions had the power to ground a flight if their demands were not met or if they wanted to hold the management to ransom. All they had to do was ask one of their members to opt out of a flight just before take-off, which they did quite frequently, and the management would have to come scrambling to their doorstep. On several occasions, the in-flight service officers posted at the airport had to call me up in the dead of night to report that the crew complement rule was leading to a flight delay and I would have to speak to the union leaders for a waiver or convince an air hostess who had been promoted to the officer grade—and was therefore not a member of the union—to fly instead.
    In another directive, the union leaders stipulated that the crew would not proceed towards the aircraft until the entire crew had assembled in the Cabin Crew Movement Control Office that was located in the airport terminal. This inevitably led to fight delays, because if even one member was late due to traffic or heavy rains or for any other reason, the entire crew had to wait in the office. They could not get on the aircraft or initiate the pre-departure formalities or begin boarding the passengers. The union gained nothing from such directives, which were not just arbitrary but also resulted in great inconvenience to passengers.
    The unions were strengthened by the weakness of previous departmental heads and the ineptness of the HR department. The issues they raised were trivial and seemed to be nothing more than attempts to achieve personal gain at the airline’s cost. There was a time when the AICCA had clashed with the pilots’ union over its demand for a common colour and fabric for the uniforms of cabin crew and pilots. The pilots said that this would cause identity problems, because the security teams and the general public were not