Given that he has compared his fat cat pilots to McDonalds managers, one wonders what description new Aer Lingus boss Michael Foley has for his cabin crew who are about to walk off the job for 24 hours next week.
The longer all this goes on, the more one wonders whether Aer Lingus will ever be in a state to offer itself to investors. Certainly, an awful lot of things are going to have to change at the airline over the next few months if Current Account was to recommend anybody to go near the shares.
Why should anybody invest in what seems to be an industrial battle ground where trade unions are not only squabbling with management but also among themselves over who represents whom.
First to the pilots, who have made a fatuous claim for pay parity with their counterparts at British Airways, Aer Lingus's partners in the Oneworld alliance. Pilots - not content with trousering up to £90,000 a year for their arduous endeavours - now believe they're worth up to £140,000 sterling. Why? Because BA pilots can earn that much even though BA is umpteen times bigger than Aer Lingus.
No wonder Michael Foley felt pilots needed to get a dose of reality.
Next we come to the cabin crew, who still seem to live in the 1960s when air hostesses (they were all female then) harboured the delusion that serving food and drinks while flying across the Atlantic was somehow a glamourous occupation.
Not to put too fine a point on it, caked-on make up and a designer uniform does not make the cabin crew's job anything other than it actually is - waiting - with pay that should match. The fact that cabin crew are now going ahead with a strike when their dispute over who represents them has not even been sorted out by intermediary Gerry Durkan is an indication of the industrial relations environment at Aer Lingus, something that is unlikely to change radically just because Aer Lingus floats itself on the stock market.
Eircom has been criticised on the basis that many of its staff have (in their minds anyway) never left the semi-state sector. Aer Lingus staff - still trading only thanks to £175 million of Exchequer support - have the same mindset, judging by the chaos that seems likely at the airline over the coming weeks.
So what does all this mean for somebody thinking of having a punt on Aer Lingus? One's tempted to think of the words "barge" and "pole", given that Aer Lingus is planning to float when oil prices are high, competition is intensifying and then natives are rebelling. But, as one fund manager put it to Current Account a few weeks, everything has its price.
If Aer Lingus is sold at a knockdown price, it might be worth a punt. Anything more than a very low multiple would mean that Aer Lingus would be overpriced given the plethora of uncertainties that exist.
Of course, if by some miracle Michael Foley happens to get this troublesome staff into line by IPO time, then there might be a better argument for punting.
One wishes Davy, CSFB, AIB and Salomon a lot of luck in their efforts to float the group. If they manage to get a good price, they will deserve whatever fees they get.
Still on airlines, there's a good argument for anybody with Ryanair shares to take some profit now - given that the airline is now trading at more than 42 times historic earnings, a huge premium to virtually every other publicly-quoted airline stock. Good Ryanair might be at its low cost operations, but that sort of multiple should be tempting especially as EasyJet is set to come to market at what will undoubtedly be a modest multiple.
