A meeting for shop stewards with the chairman of FLS, Mr Steffen Harpoth, last week was one of the critical factors in swinging the vote at TEAM Aer Lingus towards acceptance of the £54.6 million buy-out of their letters of guarantee.
The role of the Minister for Public Enterprise, Ms O'Rourke, in always being available to coax or cajole unions and management towards agreement, was another.
Most significant was probably the growing awareness among TEAM workers of dwindling support for their various alternative investment strategies, even from the north Dublin TDs who had been so vociferous in championing their cause in the past. By yesterday evening, 1,100 of TEAM's 1,550 employees had returned acceptance forms to Mr Gerard Durcan SC, the facilitator in the buy-out discussions. Unions and management were confident that more acceptances would follow, bringing the level of 72 per cent acceptance to 75 per cent or more. At times, the Sisyphean task of shedding its aircraft maintenance subsidiary seemed too much for Aer Lingus. The workforce seemed almost wilfully committed to an alternative investment strategy based on finding a minority shareholder which would work with Aer Lingus. The workers even proposed that they become a minority shareholder themselves, investing the £54.6 million buyout package they were being offered to go to FLS, in return for a minority shareholding of their own in the company.
However, the workers and their unions were perceived as part of the problem by Aer Lingus and potential outside investors.
When TEAM was established, the shop stewards effectively controlled work on the shop floor. Management was almost in the role of middle man, negotiating a price with the customer at one end of the process and a price with its own workers to do the work won at the other.
After the 1994 dispute which almost closed the facility, conditions were imposed which were draconian by contrast with earlier days and were not acceptable to everyone. Less than a year later, one of the leading shop-floor activists, Mr Denis Smyth, was dismissed for leaving his workplace to attend a union meeting and refusing to accept new disciplinary procedures. He claimed the company was making an example of him, the company said he had become unmanageable and could not adjust to new conditions.
Either way, the decision to sack him was seen as a sign of the changing times at TEAM Aer Lingus.
However, TEAM continued to lose money and last year Aer Lingus began to search in earnest for a buyer. Ms O'Rourke gave her sanction to the FLS proposals as long ago as October 1997. The problem was the letters of guarantee which 1,100 of the TEAM workers held from the time when they transferred from Aer Lingus to the new company.
Those letters promised that Aer Lingus would always retain a 51 per cent share in TEAM and that they would remain Aer Lingus employees until they retired.
Serious talks on buying them out did not begin until March. The price tag rose swiftly, from £24 million to £47 million and eventually £54.6 million. The problem was not so much that the TEAM workers wanted more money before they would leave Aer Lingus, as that they did not want to leave at all. The core resisters were the craft workers.
SIPTU members, some of whom were technicians and supervisory staff, as well as clerical and stores personnel, were more open to persuasion, but it was the craft workers who were needed to make a viable operational unit of TEAM for any purchaser.
As far back as last December Mr Harpoth expressed his readiness to meet this group and answer its concerns, but Aer Lingus management was understandably nervous. Instead the £54.6 million offer went out only to be rejected by almost 60 per cent of the TEAM workers, including 80 per cent of craft workers, last May.
That situation would not have changed if Mr Harpoth had not trusted his instincts and met 30 trade union officials and shop stewards face to face last week. Within 24 hours, he honoured his promise to respond as positively as he could to their concerns.
They had wanted the 16-month pay freeze lifted on their salaries. He offered to do so within 28 days of an FLS takeover, provided they observed an industrial "peace".
They asked for employment guarantees and, in the event of redundancies, parity with Aer Lingus workers. He said he hoped to increase rather than reduce employment. "In the unlikely event" of redundancies, they would be on the basis of the most recent voluntary redundancies in TEAM. He also gave commitments on early retirement, pensions and travel concessions. So far 1,100 TEAM Aer Lingus workers seem to have taken him at his word. It remains to be seen if 1,100 is enough.