Liberalization, hysteresis, and labor relations in Western European commercial aviation

Airlines have reacted in many ways to the liberalization and privatization of commercial aviation in Western Europe, one of them being outsourcing. The labor unions, for their part, have reacted in unexpected ways to these developments, not cooperating as anticipated by various political theories and, conversely, collaborating surprisingly under other conditions. The paper, adopting the "institutional logics" perspective of institutional theory, seeks to outline the developments between the Spanish Union of Airline Pilots (SEPLA) and the Spanish airline Iberia. It shows that a specific protectionist-bureaucratic institutional logic has "sedimented" into a cultural-cognitive and normative framework among pilots in the incumbent airline, which leaves them in a state of "hysteresis," unable to react adequately to the increasingly marketized institutional logic of the field. The broader scope of the argument is demonstrated by the case of Switzerland. Overall, the argument seems to apply not only to unions in commercial aviation but also to formerly public airlines and, at a more abstract level, to privatized state companies generally.