Mumbai, October 16
Under severe attack for sacking 1,900 employees a day after its alliance with Kingfisher, leading private airline Jet Airways today apologised to the terminated staffers and asked them to join duty from tomorrow.
“I apologise for what they have gone through...my decision is without external or internal pressure,” Jet chief Naresh Goyal told reporters in an emotionally choked voice, late tonight. However, he dismissed questions relating to political pressure, including a threat by Raj Thackeray that Jet would not be allowed to fly from Mumbai.
Dubbing the entire workforce as part
of a family, he said, “How we continue to fly and not be grounded due to economic conditions we will work out.” “The decision is not any under pressure. My wife (Anita) is standing by it,” he added. Repeatedly apologising for the decision, he appealed to the sacked employees saying “sab log wapas aayenge” (everybody will come back).
The top two private airlines, Jet and Kingfisher, which account for about 60 per cent of domestic aviation traffic, had announced on Monday an alliance to share their resources and flying routes to beat the economic downturn.
Asked if the decision was taken to sack the employees because of the alliance, Goyal said: “It has nothing to do with it. Alliance is a separate thing. A steering group has already being constituted and it is working for rationalisation of routes and other things.”
Goyal, however, evaded all the questions on whether the sacked employees were from JetLite, a company that was created after the acquisition of Air Sahara, or the political pressure including that from the government.
Earlier, seeking to address concerns of 1,900 employees retrenched by Jet Airways, the Union labour ministry had convened a tripartite meeting in Mumbai tomorrow to discuss the lay-offs, officials said tonight.
The CPM-affiliated trade union, CITU, had also registered a complaint with the Labour Commissioner’s office in Mumbai in this regard and sought the resignation of civil aviation minister Praful Patel for his “insensitive response” to the lay-offs.
CPI-backed AITUC had described the lay-off as “illegal” and “against the provisions of the Industrial Disputes Act”.
“AITUC and CITU will take up the issue with the Prime Minister and the Union labour minister. It is unfortunate that the government on the one hand is trying to bail out airlines with sops and concessions, but on the other doing nothing to protect the jobs of employees,” AITUC general secretary Gurudas Dasgupta had said.
Earlier in the day several retrenched employees of Jet Airways had protested at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi. The employees gathered at terminal-1B and chanted slogans against the airlines’ chief Naresh Goyal and chairman of Kingfisher Airlines Vijay Mallya.
— PTI
