In a few weeks, two Indian airlines — Vistara and Air India Express — were hit by protests from sections of employees critical to operations. In early April, Vistara was rocked by disruptions when many of its pilots called in sick en masse. Last week, something similar happened at Air India Express, with a large number of senior cabin crew taking coordinated sick leaves, resulting in network-wide disruptions for the airline.
Over the years, calling in sick en masse, also known as a “sickout”, has emerged as an instrument of industrial action by employees — mainly in key operations roles — to disrupt operations and strike work without calling a formal strike.
While aviation is one industry that has been evidently prone to this collective bargaining tool over the years, other sectors have also been impacted. Here’s a look at the practice and why it has been employed time and again.
What is a sickout, and how does it differ from a strike?
A sickout essentially involves organising a large number of workers with grievances and getting them to take coordinated leaves on the pretext of being unwell, usually at the eleventh hour, giving the management hardly any time to respond effectively and put mitigation measures in place.
Usually, sickouts spring a surprise on the management as there is no strike notice or formal procedure that precedes such an act.
In essence, both traditional strikes and sickouts are similar, as they involve employees refusing to work to force the management to address their grievances and consider their demands. However, while strikes are usually formal and legal affairs involving notices, procedures, recognised employee unions and associations, and typically a well-laid-down process, sickouts are seemingly informal, swift, and free of such constraints.
Globally, employee unions have gone out of vogue with governments, regulators, the public at large, and even sections of workers over the years for several reasons.
Many argue that in large parts of the world, laws and regulations have been brought in to weaken labour unions and their collective bargaining potential. Private sector workers are unable to organise themselves into formal unions due to a lack of supportive legislation and government policies.
Where workers’ unions exist, some categories of employees may not be allowed to join unions or participate in strikes, and management and government may refuse to recognise or derecognise a union. There may even be competing unions with different leanings squabbling among themselves.
Then there are issues like excessive politicisation of unions, victimisation of union leaders, distrust between workers, unions, and the management, and an easily replaceable workforce, among others.
All this, in turn, has led to an evident fall in the number of formal strikes and labour agitations across sectors in many parts of the world. But that does not mean that workers never feel the need to organise themselves into interest groups, put forth their demands, and use collective bargaining tools to force the management to pay heed.
What’s behind the growing trend of sickouts?
Sickouts aren’t exactly new – workers have used them for decades. However, with formal strikes now far and few in between, they have become a lot more frequent than strikes over the past years.
Sickouts, like strikes, are usually the most effective when the protesting employees are in key operational roles, as their absence from work can cripple the company’s operations.
Therefore, it is not surprising that in the aviation sector, sickouts are mostly used as tools by pilots, cabin crew, and engineering staff, as without them, airlines just cannot operate. Sure, an airline would get hit if its non-operations staff calls in sick en masse, but definitely not as much and not as quickly as in the case of pilots or cabin crew refusing to fly.
Also, sickouts are seen as an effective tool of protest if the grievances are limited to specific departments or sections of employees, and not most of the workforce. In such scenarios, it may be difficult for the disgruntled group of employees to rally support from most of their colleagues in other departments and convince them to also strike work.
In fact, other sections of colleagues may even be against the agitation. For instance, a section of Vistara pilots agitating for a better pay structure may not garner much sympathy from their colleagues in other roles who are making far less money than the pilots.
Of course, if grievances are widespread then the scale of sickouts and the agitation could be much larger with multiple departments joining the agitation. But often, sickouts are seen as most effective as a protest tool for specific worker categories, particularly those on which the company is heavily dependent for operations.
It is also a lot more difficult for the management to take punitive action against sickouts, mainly because while it is a protest, it is in the garb of illness. Unlike a formal strike in which workers openly refuse to work and they and their leaders can easily be identified, proving that all workers who called in sick did so with malicious intent and without reasonable cause can be quite complicated from a legal perspective.
Also, identifying leaders of the protest or the forces behind the agitation can be challenging as sickouts are often organised informally, not by a structured and recognised union.
Are sickouts only limited to aviation?
In India, apart from the two sickouts seen at Vistara and Air India Express, there have been many others over the years in the aviation sector. For instance, a sizable number of aircraft technicians and cabin crew at IndiGo went on mass sick leave in 2022.
In 2013, engineers of the now-defunct Kingfisher Airlines went on mass sick leave. In 2012, Air India and Kingfisher pilots called in sick en masse over different sets of demands. In 2009, over 300 pilots of Jet Airways went on mass sick leave as part of an agitation against the airline’s management.
Although they tend to grab headlines the most when they happen in the aviation industry, sickouts are not limited to the sector. They have been used as a tool of collective bargaining by workers in different sectors in different countries. In many such instances, the workers seemingly resorted to sickouts because they were not legally allowed to strike work, which would be the case for many workers in sectors classified as essential services.
For instance, in April 2020, scores of Amazon workers — in key departments like warehousing and technology — in the United States called in sick over the company’s ostensibly inadequate response to the Covid-19 pandemic and its alleged punitive action against workers who spoke out. Similar action was witnessed by workers at other retail majors like Target and Whole Foods around the same time.
There have also been some instances of sickouts by teachers, healthcare workers, and other essential services workers in different countries over the past few years. For example, a large number of public school teachers in Detroit announced sickouts to protest against poor working conditions, leading to nearly all schools in the US city being shut.
