AI employees to get May salary next week

After a delay of about three weeks, about 30,000 employees of troubled Air India would get their salaries next Tuesday for the month of May, an airline official said today.

Funds to disburse the salaries have been arranged from banks and the payment would be credited to the employees' accounts by June 28, the senior official said.

The employees usually get their salaries by seventh of the month.

The decision came a day after CPI MP Gurudas Dasgupta termed the delay in wages payment as "illegal" and demanded a probe into the poor financial health of the national carrier.

In a letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Dasgupta, who is also the AITUC General Secretary, said delay in payment of wages to Air India employees violated the Payment of Wages Act.

"A government-owned enterprise can hardly indulge in such illegality," he said, observing that there was "gross human distress" arising out of the delay. He also sought a probe into the reasons "why Air India is in such financial distress".

Facing cash crunch, the national carrier has not been paying the performance-linked incentives (PLI) to its over 30,000-odd employees for the last three months.

The airline official said members of the management have also not been receiving PLI and some allowances, which form a major part of the total pay.

On Thursday last, Air India CMD Arvind Jadhav wrote a letter to the employees assuring them about payment of their salary soon, without specifying any date.

He said increasing debt, rising interest burden and growing fuel costs were financially crippling the company. "It is becoming difficult to sustain our operations without cash flows and revenue generation," he said.