Air India brass meets unions on pay cuts

The Air India management today met representatives of staff unions and requested the latter to accept cuts in their pay in order to convince the government that they were serious about the proposed turnaround plan.

AI’s Chairman and Managing Director, Arvind Jadhav, and the ministry’s joint secretary and airline board member Prashant Sukul, along with other senior officials, met half the unions today in Delhi. The meeting will continue tomorrow and they will also meet the rest of the 14 unions.

The airline has around 32,000 employees and performance-linked incentives (PLIs) to them constitute 40 per cent of the annual wage bill of Rs 3,100 crore.

According to sources, the unions expressed their readiness to co-operate with the airline management in the turnaround policy but they did not agree to a cut in their PLIs.

“I will go back to our representatives and discuss this, but cuts in PLI do not seem to be happening,” said a source in the union who did not wish to be identified.

The airline board had earlier planned to cut PLI of all the employees by 50 per cent, which was protested by all the unions and the airline did not implement it. Later, the management said they’d cut PLI of 7,000 top executives by 25-50 per cent.

This move was also objected to by the executive pilots, who went on mass sick leave, and the management had to roll back the decision and constitute a committee to look into all this.