Hope fades for Kingfisher staff as talks fail yet again

This has become their daily routine - meeting their boss repeatedly over past few weeks and getting assurances in return

The tea stall adjacent to Kingfisher Airlines’ glass-panelled headquarters in Andheri, just a stone’s throw away from Mumbai's domestic airport, has clearly seen happier days. It is doing brisk business alright, but the cheer is missing on the faces of its customers, most of whom work for the airline which now faces a potentially prolonged shutdown.

Wednesday morning was no exception. The drift of the conversation among the 25 to 30 engineers and pilots huddled around the makeshift stall is clear: the once-upon-a-time “king of good times” is giving them some grim times. In between sipping tea, the employees were preparing their strategy before meeting the company’s CEO Sanjay Aggarwal.

In fact, this has become their daily routine — meeting their boss repeatedly over the past few weeks and getting assurances in return. But the pilots and engineers now say assurances no longer mean anything and want some concrete action. That is, they want their salary, which has not been paid since March. Else, they won’t fly or service aircraft.

After the meeting with the CEO, nothing changed. The talks failed once again, with the pilots sticking to their demand for the pending salary and Aggarwal threatening to shut down the airline if employees did not give up their hard stance. Coming out of the meeting, Vikrant Patkar, a pilot, said, “Talks have failed” and quoted the CEO as saying the airline had no money to pay.

Pilots say most of them have dues of over Rs 30 lakh and the airline has made it clear it will not pay any money to anyone who leaves. Says a senior pilot of the airline: “All we are asking for is our salary. We get Rs 4.5 lakh a month while engineers get Rs 1.5 lakh a month, so the arrears are pretty large.”

Life has indeed been tough. Employees are turning to their retired parents or in-laws for financial help, mortgaging ornaments or breaking fixed deposits to run the house. And what has irked them and created a bigger chasm with the management is the CEO’s statement that the management was forced to declare a partial lockout because of the intimidation tactics of pilots and engineers.

Some have been forced out by landlords and are looking for alternate, cheaper places. “How can we pay our rent if we don’t earn anything?” asked a technician who was transferred to Mumbai after the airline shut its Kolkata base.

What is adding to the grim mood is the lack of transparency. “No one has any idea what is happening. The management is giving no commitment about salaries to us, though the CEO has told the aviation regulator that the airline will pay us in the next few days,” another executive remarked.