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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