Even as the dust over the seven-day agitation by the Indian Pilots Guild settles down, the question that is being hotly debated in HR circles is whether airline pilots -- the overpaid prima donnas who have struck work or agitated on 43 occasions since 1974 -- should continue to get protection as 'workmen' under the Industrial Disputes Act. And the overriding opinion is quite predictable -- it's time the strange anomaly is rectified.

Leading HR professionals refer to the recommendations of the National Commission on Labour that the government may lay down a list of highly paid jobs in high wage islands, such as those of air pilots who may be declared as non-workers. "They must be outside the purview of the laws relating to workers," the commission said.

Another alternative suggested by the commission is to fix a cut-off limit of Rs 25,000 a month, beyond which employees will not be treated as ordinary workmen. Going by this logic, airline pilots should have been out of the workmen category long back.

Air-India pilots take home a monthly salary of between Rs 250,000 and Rs 600,000. Some analysts, however, feel that salary should not be the sole criterion for determining a workman, and in any case fixing a cut-off of Rs 25,000 is quite arbitrary.

For example, a large number of supervisory and managerial personnel are drawing less than Rs 25,000 a month and they will all put pressure on the government for inclusion in the category of workers to get the benefit of labour laws.

Therein lies the irony. While a substantial number of professionals getting less than Rs 25,000 are in no position to claim labour law benefits as they are in the supervisory or managerial cadre by definition, top-bracket salary earners like pilots can strike work at every conceivable opportunity protected as they are by the ID Act.

Even if one sets aside the salary factor, consider the nature of the job. Top Air-India officials echo the line taken by the National Commission on Labour that said pilots do not merely carry out instructions from superior authorities but are required and empowered to take all kinds of on-the-spot decisions in various situations and particularly in exigencies.

Their functions, therefore, cannot merely be categorised as those of ordinary workmen. "The captain is the boss of a flight. He takes decisions independently. There is no way his job profile can be equated with a workman," an A-I official said.

It's a sad example of governmental prevarication that the commission's recommendations have been ignored so far. The results have been disastrous. Managers have to cope with the unreasonable demands of the powerful unions of the world's most over-manned (relative to its fleet strength) airline which has only 27 aircraft, and has seen passengers leaving it in droves over the past two decades.

If the A-I pilots' demand that they would not fly without guarantees that crew members had not been in a Sars-hit country in the previous 10 days was ridiculous, the point is that the pilots had been allowed to get away with murder several times in the past.

Last year, an A-I flight from Mumbai to London to Chicago was cancelled at the last moment as the pilots reported sick en masse in protest against the management's decision not to allow fare-paying, legitimate passengers off loaded to make way for relatives. The result: 35 passengers who had started boarding the aircraft were stranded. A-I lost Rs 80 lakh (Rs 8 million) and lots of goodwill.

The airline's leadership has earned a lot of kudos for taking a tough stand against the pilots this time, but a manager should be considered successful only when he sees the warning signals well in advance and take corrective steps. The alarm bells should have started ringing when the Pilots Guild stayed away from a meeting last month to discuss the Sars impact.

Also, the management had initially condoned the pilots' insistence that they would not fly to Kuwait -- even though the war in Iraq was over -- and Singapore.

But HR managers say pre-emptive action against a recalcitrant union can hardly be expected from a management that is permanently in a stage of crash-landing. Stability at the top is a prerequisite for a company that wants to have an excellent HR track record.

The turbulent scenarios at A-I are hardly surprising given that after 1978 when the late JRD Tata was sacked as chairman of the airline that he founded, there have been at least 10 CEOs with an average tenure of only two years. If the chief executive is permanently struggling to stay in the pilot's seat, holding the airline to ransom is just a cakewalk for 'workmen'.