Aer Lingus' PR campaign against the pilots backfires

On Monday 20 August, the day before Aer Lingus pilots were due to go on strike, Eoghan Corry produced an analysis of the conflict in the Evening Herald. He remarked that the “pilots have one of the slickest PR machines in the business [and] have managed the news agenda to promote their cause.” In reality, however, coverage of the potential strike showed absolutely no evidence of any behind-the-scenes manipulation by pilots and indeed suggested quite the opposite conclusion.  
Within 24 hours of the pilots' announcement of the planned strike, Aer Lingus launched a media offensive.

Their press release lamented the fact that “pilots would choose to attack customers in an act of self-centred brinkmanship”.  They were bolstered by immediate press statements issued by several other groups. IBEC, “the group that represents Irish business”, denounced the strike threat as “opportunism of the worst kind.” ITIC, the Irish Tourist Industry Confederation, issued a statement entitled “ITIC Demands Strike to be called off”, while ITAA, the Irish Travel Agents Association, accused the pilots of “treating the public with contempt”.  All of these press releases closely echoed the position put forward by Aer Lingus's management. Regardless of whether it was a coordinated campaign or whether it was simply instinctive capitalist class-solidarity in action, the volley of denunciations succeeded in setting the news agenda.

The views of IBEC, ITIC and ITAA featured prominently in the news bulletins and newspaper articles announcing the strike threat. The unanimous opinion of the assembled organisations representing interested capitalists was unbalanced by any coverage of the opinions of organisations representing interested workers. The colourful denunciations of Michael O'Leary, CEO of Aer Lingus's chief rival, Ryanair, were even widely aired – without anybody remarking on the irony of a multi-millionaire who seems to spend all his time posing for wacky photo-opportunities referring to pilots as “overpaid, underworked peacocks”.

A large majority of subsequent coverage of the dispute presented the union as the active agent in a situation that was inconveniencing the public, thereby implicitly accepting management's position.  This was typified by the Examiner headline which apocryphally predicted: “pilots' strike to cause holiday chaos.”

There were no attempts to evaluate the union's claim that management were breaking the collective agreement with pilots. Nobody asked why the company was unwilling to have the claim evaluated by the state's industrial relations apparatus.  In the midst of the dispute, the Irish Times devoted the front page of their weekend section to a long interview with Aer Lingus CEO Dermot Mannion. As is usual in profiles of business figures, the interview was admiring in tone.

It presented the dispute as a test of Mannion's character. Mannion's management experience was in Emirates, a Dubai based airline with a “can-do attitude”, where management didn't have unions to stop them from “getting things done”. Thus, proving his mettle meant that “the strike has to be faced down”. The pervasiveness of coverage coloured by management's agenda can partially be explained by PR slickness. Unlike trade unions, corporations have the resources to pay significant numbers of people to write press-releases, cultivate media contacts, arrange favourable interviews, contact radio stations and all of the other means by which the news agenda can be influenced. However, it's not simply a consequence of an imbalance in resources.

 If newspaper coverage of the dispute had exclusively highlighted the views of trade unionists and socialists, and prominently featured sympathetic interviews with union leaders where they were given space to promulgate their goal of liberating the oppressed workers, it would be glaringly obvious that it was socialist propaganda. However, the neo-liberal capitalist view of the world, where profitability is the only goal worth considering and unions are little more than an obstacle to management's plans to attain that goal, is so common in the corporate media that it is almost invisible. Coverage which uniformly assumes, for example, that it is economically desirable to give management greater power to unilaterally impose changes to working agreements, is so common that it appears to be simply stating the obvious rather than looking like ideological capitalist propaganda.

Corry's article in the Herald, in which he described how the pilots PR machine had managed the news agenda wasn't necessarily entirely delusional or dishonest.

Aer Lingus's PR campaign against the pilots was less successful than usual in painting the strikers as the villains.  Normally, when workers whose salaries are above average threaten industrial action, they face a PR offensive which portrays them as greedy aristocrats and the company as the champion of low prices for ordinary consumers.

However, in this case, Aer Lingus was simultaneously engaged in a much greater battle regarding the termination of its service from Shannon to Heathrow.  In the PR war over Shannon, they were presenting themselves as a hard-nosed commercial entity which is obliged to chase profits over the pleas of ordinary consumers – a contradictory position which rendered their PR offensive against the pilots ineffective, leading them to eventually back down and agree to negotiations.