Tigerair pilot Vivek M Hira was a branch observer at Tigerair Staff Union before the airline merged with Scoot in July 2017. He was introduced into the union by an executive committee member.
Since then, he has risen through the ranks. In July this year, Vivek assumed the role of president in Scoot Staff Union (previously known as Scoot Tigerair Staff Union, STSU).
Vivek: I was a mid-career switcher. I joined the police force when I was 18 for five and a half years. For two years after that, I sold insurance. When I was 25, I started a pub, where I met a lot of pilots.
Hearing their stories, I fell in love with the job and their lifestyle but it was only after my pub closed in 1998, that I began to pursue that dream. I took up a two-year cadet programme in the States and managed to complete it in about 14 months.
Merging two different cultures, Tigerair and Scoot, has been the most challenging. We both fly airplanes and serve customers but at that time, Tigerair had a longer history of about 10 years and Tigerair Staff Union’s existence was relatively short – about a year when the merger happened.
Comparatively, Scoot was around for about 5-6 years, but the union has grown together with the company, almost since the beginning. We have a company with a long tradition and very little union context, and a younger company with deep union involvement.
Tigerair, not having a union, had always negotiated with the management directly. It’s all very informal. The staff will sometimes just iron things out with the management over a cup of coffee. When the union came into the picture, they had union representatives to negotiate for them instead and there is a formality to follow.
However, things are more organised and structured. Everyone is clear about who they can talk to about their issues, and what is agreed upon during the negotiations.
Unions typically represent either the blue-collar or white-collar. STSU represents not just the ground, but cabin crew and pilots as well.
Our Executive Committee comprises cabin crew, pilots and ground representatives from departments such as operations, engineering and finance.
The union, with some 2000 members, has about 89 per cent staff penetration and has seen a steady pick-up in numbers.
The standardisation of pay structure for the Tigerair and Scoot pilots. It was an uphill task that took six to eight months. We had to engage the pilots and the HR multiple times. There were many variations, proposals and counter-proposals. We had to think what was the most logical and sustainable way.
In the first quarter of this year, we finally locked it down, with acceptance from majority of our members.
During the transition period after the merger, we had a memorandum of understanding with the management. Now that we have stabilised the integration, the union is working to draft our first Collective Agreement (CA) with the management.
We are still at an early stage, but we have given ourselves the tentative date of March 2019 to complete the CA. For now, we have divided ourselves into different teams to research other CAs and sieve out good practices that we can adopt.
For the last two years, the union has been occupied with bread-and-butter issues. Moving forward, we will like to raise awareness on other aspects of what the Labour Movement can offer such as U Sports.
Scoot Staff Union (STSU)
Date of Registration: 1 Oct 2016
Date of Affiliation to NTUC: 31 Oct 2016
Membership: 2,000 members
