This is one tug-of-war that has no winners. On the one hand, you have the Indian government trying its utmost to revive the country’s national airline Air India; on the other hand there are people—and often events—that bring down the airline.
More than 100 pilots have written a letter to Air India Chairman and Managing Director Rohit Nandan threatening to quit if the management does not change its discriminatory attitude towards them. Copies of the letter have also been sent to the Minister for Civil Aviation Vayalar Ravi and other officials in the ministry. If the pilots do take the ultimate step of quitting, the Maharaja might as well say goodbye to his international operations.
The move that brought about the letter came just a few days before pilots selected for the Dreamliner training program were to start their course; Air India will be getting the plane in December of this year. The pilots—all members of the Indian Pilots’ Guild (IPG)—said they were upset with the management and were “compelled to seek a No Objection Certificate (required by the pilots to take up a new job) so that we may consider seeking employment elsewhere. Kindly consider this a unified and collective request from all of us as a group.”
The crux of the problem lies with the merger of the two airlines – Air India and Indian Airlines. These pilots—all of them are from the former Air India—are upset about the management's decision to provide training to the former Indian Airlines for the Dreamliners. Since the new planes would be used for long-haul international flights, the IPG pilots want to be picked first. The IPG has around 200 pilots from the pre-merged Air India.
The letter goes on to say that 120 Air India pilots were “arbitrarily” transferred to Air India Express (the low fare version of Air India) leading to a shortage of manpower, and that was “now being used to justify the induction of pilots from erstwhile Indian Airlines to fly the Boeing 787.” To top it all off, the letter claimed that the Indian Airlines pilots had little experience to fly Dreamliners.
Even before the letter, the IPG circulated an online note asking its members to vote for a strike. According to Indian labor laws, any organization deciding to go on a strike has to give advance notice to the management. The online voting was a precursor to the notice that the IPG plans to serve to the Air India management for the strike. The Ministry of Civil Aviation has, in fact, constituted a panel led by a former judge of the Supreme Court of India, Justice D.M. Dharmadhikari, to look into the human resources issues that have arisen after the merger of the two airlines into the National Aviation Company of India Limited (NACIL).
The panel, appointed in February this year, started work on April 27, 2011—coincidentally the first day of a strike by around 700 pilots from the two erstwhile airlines— and was expected to submit its findings and recommendations by September 2011. The IPG pilots have said in their note that, by sending the Indian Airlines pilots for training, the Air India management was “pre-empting the outcome of the Justice Dharmadhikari panel, which is yet to submit its report.”
One of the anomalies pointed out by the pilots states that while pilots of the former Indian Airlines with only four years of experience were being promoted to the position of Commanders, around 80-odd pilots from the unmerged Air India with eight years of experience were still in Command Training.
Compounding the problems, the Indian Airlines pilots have issued a warning to the management that if the order on training for the Dreamliners is reversed, they too could resort to an agitation. For the moment, however, the first priority is to make their salaries at par with those drawn by the Air India pilots. One of the pilots who did not wish to be named said that they needed to get their salaries. When they went on strike some time ago, the management told them: “No work, no pay.” This time around, the pilot said they would adopt the principle of “No pay, no work.”
Air India informed the Bombay High Court on Wednesday that the training schedule of the pilots for the Dreamliner, slated to start from Thursday November 3, 2011, has been deferred till the end of the month as negotiations were on with the Indian Pilots Guild (IPG) over the issue.--
Tirthankar Ghosh
Gravity always wins!