SHAR­LENE RAM­PER­SAD

The Avi­a­tion Com­mu­ni­ca­tion and Al­lied Work­ers Union (ACAWU) says if Caribbean Air­lines (CAL) in­tends to re­trench 450 of its staff, their re­trench­ment pack­ages should in­clude res­i­den­tial and agri­cul­tur­al lots.

The union’s gen­er­al sec­re­tary, Pe­ter Farmer said the same ben­e­fits giv­en to for­mer work­ers of state-owned Petrotrin and Ca­roni 1975 Lim­it­ed, should be af­ford­ed to CAL staff.

The union met vir­tu­al­ly with its mem­ber­ship on Thurs­day and Farmer said the work­ers be­lieve the re­trench­ment ex­er­cise is ill-ad­vised at this time.

“That con­sid­er­ing that by 2023 CAL would re­turn to pre-COVID-19 lev­el earn­ings from pas­sen­ger and car­go traf­fic, the $110 mil­lion plus, planned for the pay­ment of re­trench­ment would be waste­ful spend­ing,” the re­lease stat­ed.

On Mon­day, the air­line an­nounced it would be re­struc­tur­ing its op­er­a­tions af­ter a $172 mil­lion loss in the first quar­ter of 2021. That re­struc­tur­ing in­cludes the re­trench­ment of 25 per cent or ap­prox­i­mate­ly 450 of its staff. The com­pa­ny has al­ready in­di­cat­ed it in­tends to re­trench be­tween 95 to 115 pi­lots dur­ing this ex­er­cise. CAL will al­so cut routes and its fleet as the air­line said fore­cast­ers an­tic­i­pate a grim out­look for the in­dus­try un­til 2023.

Farmer said he was again call­ing on the air­line to meet with the union to dis­cuss any ac­tion be­fore mov­ing for­ward.

Both par­ties have been locked in a bat­tle since CAL was formed in 2007, as the com­pa­ny de­nies it was a suc­ces­sor of BWIA and main­tains the union is not a recog­nised ma­jor­i­ty union (RMU).

AWACU has re­lied on a 2017 In­dus­tri­al Court rul­ing which found CAL was BWIA’s suc­ces­sor and the unions that ex­ist­ed un­der BWIA should be grant­ed their RMU sta­tus. CAL has since ap­pealed that de­ci­sion but a rul­ing is yet to be hand­ed down.

Yes­ter­day, Farmer said there are many work­ers who have been “tem­porar­i­ly” laid off with­out pay for the past nine months. He said the work­ers be­lieve that the mon­ey the com­pa­ny saved by not pay­ing them for the past nine months will now to used to fund the re­trench­ment ex­er­cise.

“In oth­er words, the work­ers feel that they would be pay­ing to re­trench them­selves…That the first thing that needs to be done be­fore any re­trench­ment monies are paid is that they should re­ceive their salaries for the nine months that they have been laid off.”

He al­so claimed the com­pa­ny was not tak­ing ac­tion against its em­ploy­ees in Ja­maica and said that sug­gests the com­pa­ny was try­ing to get rid of ACAWU.

Mean­while, the meet­ing be­tween the air­line and the T&T Air­line Pi­lots As­so­ci­a­tion (TTAL­PA) card­ed for Fri­day was can­celled. TTAL­PA’s ex­ec­u­tive ad­min­is­tra­tor, Shelly Sadaphal told Guardian Me­dia a meet­ing was set for 10 am on Fri­day, af­ter CAL wrote to the union on Wednes­day.

“They re­spond­ed (Thurs­day) af­ter­noon stat­ing some sched­ules could not per­mit and we were re­quest­ed to pro­pose al­ter­na­tive dates for next week and to let them know of any spe­cif­ic da­ta that we re­quire them to present at our first con­sul­ta­tion,” Sadaphal said.

She said the union was in the process of de­ter­min­ing which da­ta it needs.

“We hope to re­ceive the da­ta so that we can have mean­ing­ful con­sul­ta­tion as pre­scribed both in law and un­der the terms of our Col­lec­tive Agree­ment.”