Jitender Bhargava

“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.”
― Jitender Bhargava, The Descent of Air India: Revised Edition