Posted in Airlines, Jet Fuel, Passengers, Planes, Travel Woes, tagged Air India, Airlines, Cancel, Capacity cuts, India, Jet Airways, Job loss, Kingfisher, Lay-off, Leave without Pay, Order cancelation, Protest, Retrenchment, Sack, Trouble on October 16, 2008 |
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There has been a lot of news recently with regard to big losses realized by airlines in India due to high price of oil, weakening demand, fierce competition causing inability to raise fares to requirements and rapid growth over the past years.
Jet Airways
On Tuesday October 14th 2008, the airlines laid off 850 cabin crew members (total employees – 13,000) and a day later announced plans for laying off another 1,050 across different departments and functions (including pilots and management personnel). The the salary and benefits saving is reported to be around 50 million rupees (around US $1 million). The layoffs caused protests and have caused some political interest in the country. The airline has already announced capacity cuts along with discontinuation of some routes.
From Times of India -
“The
number of flights that Jet Airways will offer as part of its winter schedule
will be approximately 15% lower than originally planned. This is inevitable in
view of declining traffic volumes,” Jet Airways’ chief executive officer
Wolfgang Prock Schauer said.
Some international flights — like
on the Mumbai-Shanghai-San Francisco sector — have already been
discontinued. There are plans to withdraw the Amritsar-London service and
postpone the foray into Saudi Arabia.
Kingfisher Airlines
Kingfisher seems to be going the same route with a possibility of a “less painful” (with respect to Jet Airways) layoffs. There are talks about layoffs to come mostly from ex-Air Deccan employees.The airlines is already planning to return 7 aircrafts to the lessors. Also, the airline canceled orders for 3 Airbus A340 aircrafts and deferred deliveries of 32 Airbus A320 aircrafts.
From Times of India -
“The last time when they fired 300 employees, they discarded a lot of good talent, which was surprising. However, they did it with much more dignity and grace than what Jet has displayed,” said a former Deccan employee. “This time around, they’re being more careful with who they want to fire.”
Pilots with little or no experience will be the first to go, while more experienced hands will be retained. “It’s the cabin crew that will be axed mercilessly and that will most certainly be from the Deccan side. As it is, Kingfisher has always looked down upon the Deccan staff, particularly the cabin crew. Their cabin crew are projected as models and they will not sack them as easily. There is a lot of panic among the Deccan cabin crew girls and they’ve been sending out their resumes to a lot of international airlines since hiring has seen an overall slowdown in all Indian airlines,” said a source.
Air India
Air India, the country’s national airline, announced that it is considering to offer leave without pay to as many as 15,000 employees for a period of up to 5 years. The airline added that the employees who will take this offer will be allowed to return back to same job with same seniority and pay rate. The airline did mention that the reduction plan was not mandatory and is not a retrenchment. It is hard for me to understand why the employees would take this offer unless there is a lay-off plan to follow.
From BBC -
Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel has stressed there were no plans compulsorily to prune staff numbers which currently total about 25,000 people.
“Air India is not going to have any job cuts. Certainly it [the aviation crisis] will affect the growth plans, it will affect the future employment opportunities which would have come the way of Air India in case the aviation industry was in a much better financial health,” Mr Patel told PTI.
“But as of now I do not have the luxury to say [anything] beyond the fact that those who are working for Air India shall continue to do so and we shall not have any issue of people being laid off.”
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