Friday, 15 June 2012

How many agreements will Air India dishonour?


The current crisis that Air India is faced with is to be blamed on the Air India management to a large extent. Unsure of the road forward, the management from the beginning has been taking its instructions from the aviation minister and not in the best interest of the airline and its employees. There are several layers to the problems of Air India.
CMD Rohit Nandan has no answers to the allegations of why the Indian Airlines pilots were promised an allowance of $1,500 and fixed hours of pay last November even while the Dharmadikari Committee was making its report.
While all concerned officials agree that the erstwhile Air India pilots have been snobbish, none have denied their allegations against the management. The management has signed so many wage contracts with different section of the employees, that it is impossible to honour all of them under the turnaround plan. “If the claims of these pilots on strike getting `8 lakh for salary is true, the management is to be blamed for agreeing to such high pay scales at a time when it could ill-afford it.
These are wages that the management agreed to even before the merger and even when there was no union. So isn’t the management to be blamed for this anomaly?” ex-Air India employee Jitendra Bhargava said.
Subsequently, wage agreements of the erstwhile Indian Airlines’ pilots let them have an additional wage for operating hub and spoke flights which have no rhyme and reason for such a classification. “A pilot who does Delhi-Chennai with the code 143 on a day is his regular flight. However, a second flight with the code 043 on the same route is a hub and spoke flight for which he gets paid additional. All this made sense when IC pilots were not paid for a fixed amount of flying and their flying allowance was dictated by the amount of flying they did. Now they are paid for a fixed amount of 72 hours and still continue to draw the extra perks,” an Air India official said.
A wage agreement of 2007 with Air India pilots states, “Till such time the induction of twelve B787 aircraft in the fleet is completed, the conversion of Commanders onto B787 will be as per line seniority from B747-400/B777/A310. The IPG cite this as a promise that they would get to operate the first 12 Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft. They also claim that this clause was never amended. As the facts stand, not honoring this promise will adversely affect hundreds of IPG pilots,” an ex-employee of the airline highlighted. In such a scenario, does the argument of a merged entity with merged pay scales hold good?
“Some of the arguments that work well for running Air India and Indian Airlines as two business verticals under the NACIL umbrella are -different working cultures, different aircraft types- while AI flies Boeing, IA flies Airbus and the flight crew is not interchangeable. Both the airlines have different maintenance philosophies, standards and requirements and lastly human resources which could not be brought under one roof. The only reason, that a single airline, could have worked, would have been for the seamless connectivity for a passenger and the extensive connectivity the airlines could have offered,” noted Ratan Shrivastava, Director, Aerospace & Defence, Frost & Sullivan.

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