Not paid their salary for months, unsure whether to leave and look for another job, employees have been hit the hardest by the troubles at Kingfisher Airlines. Indulekha Aravind speaks to a few to find out how they’re coping
A call to Nikita Sharma*, a cabin crew member with Kingfisher Airlines, is answered by her cousin. Sharma has asked her to screen calls in case it is her flight supervisor asking her to report for duty. Sharma had not reported for work for most of March because she had not been paid her salary for four months.
But this is not the only sore point, she says. “They even stopped providing cabs for us to report to work and, sometimes, when I took a cab on my own and asked for reimbursement, they would inform me that they had no cash... I really have no incentive to go to work.” Sharma, who joined the airline last July and started flying in January, says she is fortunate to be living with her family but has had to cut down on all her expenses, from eating out to using her mobile phone. “I have to think twice even about getting into an autorickshaw,” says Sharma, whose salary is supposed to be in the range of Rs 35,000 a month.
The tailspin that Kingfisher, promoted by flashy industrialist Vijay Mallya, is in is a familiar story. Saddled with a debt of Rs 7,057 crore and a net loss of Rs 1,027 crore as of March 2011, the airline has not registered a profit since it was launched with the flamboyance typical of Mallya on his son Sidhartha’s birthday in May 2005. It reported a net loss of Rs 444 crore in the third quarter ended December 2011, a dip of 75 per cent compared with the same period a year ago. Employees like Sharma have unwittingly been caught in the nightmare.
Maria Vaz*, who joined Kingfisher last January, says the delay in salaries was a gradual process. “At first, they started deferring payment to the 7th, then it became the 15th, then a whole month passed and we weren’t paid... and now I haven’t been paid in four months.” Discussions with supervisors about refusal to report for work because of non-payment of salaries seem to have verged on emotional blackmail. “I was made to talk to the base manager who told me things like ‘You are either with us or not — we have been good to you for so long.’” Vaz, like Sharma, lives with her family and so has a financial cushion, but there are many others who are not so lucky. Some junior out-of-town crew members, she says, have been unable to pay rent and face eviction.
Both Vaz and Sharma have been able to find jobs with other airlines, Vaz with an international carrier and Sharma with a domestic low-cost carrier. But there are others like cabin crew Anjali Singh* who don’t have that escape hatch. “This is my first job and I’ve just been working for nine months. So I don’t have much of a choice but to stick on,” she says. Being a newcomer, job security is another concern. “We are new crew... we would be the first to go if they start letting go of employees,” she says.
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So far, Kingfisher has not announced any retrenchment plan. In a statement last month, the airline said that “we are in a ‘holding’ pattern right now and are waiting for various decisions from the government and our consortium of bankers on FDI [foreign direct investment] policy, working capital funding, etc. All of these will have a major impact on the staffing decisions we will have to make...” The airline last week asked half its staff of around 7,000 to stay at home till it received fresh funds, in the wake of halting of operations in several cities, including Kolkata, Hyderabad and Ahmedabad. It has suspended international flights from March 25, following its removal from the International Air Transport Association due to non-payment of dues. It currently operates 120 flights a day with 20 aircraft, down from over 400 flights a day with 64 aircraft in its winter schedule.
The crisis has naturally sparked attrition. Last December, for example, over 30 air hostesses left Kingfisher to join national carrier Air India. The number of new CVs posted by Kingfisher staff on www.naukri.com during the last one year is almost 2.5 times more than those from Jet Airways, the recruitment portal says. Kingfisher Airlines declined to comment for this article.
If most are worried, Prashant Nayyar*, a Kingfisher pilot who has been with the airline since January 2005, is bitter when he speaks about the non-payment of dues. “How would you feel if you have not received your salary for months but then hear that your boss is celebrating New Year with his friends and family in Johannesburg?” he asks. (A pilot with six years of experience in domestic airlines makes an average of Rs 4 lakh a month.) Nayyar, who feels it is sheer mismanagement that has brought the airline to its knees, says his savings have almost dried up, and with his wife not able to work because they’ve just had a baby, life isn’t easy. “Every six months, pilots have to undergo a recurrent training test, so that you can keep your licence current, at a cost of $2,000 — something that’s supposed to be covered by your airline. But at Kingfisher, 320 pilots in Bangalore and 350 in Mumbai did the test by paying for it themselves because the airline wouldn’t,” he adds.
The crisis has also made it difficult for staff to obtain bank credit — Nayyar says banks were reluctant to sanction a loan for a house he bought recently once they heard he was working with Kingfisher. “I have a friend who made a down payment on a house but was then refused a loan outright by a private sector bank because he was a Kingfisher employee,” he adds.
A senior IDBI Bank official admits that the bank has been cautious about lending to staff of all airlines in the last few months, and not just Kingfisher. Credit card applications, he says, are being subject to greater scrutiny and banks sometimes sit on applications, since rejecting them outright might invite trouble. Credit limits are also reduced. For home loans, higher collateral is demanded. “We want to play cautious — we don’t want to court trouble,” he says.
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With all this negative publicity, has Kingfisher lost its appeal as a coveted workplace? Kingfisher, not so long ago, was the most stylish Indian airline and the preferred employer of many youngsters. Sameer Walia, marketing head of Frankfinn Institute of Air Hostess Training, feels Kingfisher’s recent troubles may not make much of a difference to a “fresher”. “When you’re new, merely getting a foothold in the industry is a big deal in itself,” he says.
Kingfisher Training and Aviation Services, the troubled airline’s training academy, has not been affected by the ongoing crisis either, says Rajesh Varma, its chief mentor and executive vice-president of Kingfisher. “The academy is a completely separate concern, and students are recruited by all airlines. Also, it would be hard to say even if recruitment does happen to be affected because companies from the aviation and hospitality sectors hire from the academy — it’s not dependent on just one industry.”
People like cabin crew member Anjali Singh* are now pinning their hopes on Mallya’s latest assurance that all junior staff, pilots and engineers will be paid by April 10. “My only focus now is to start paying your seriously overdue salaries,” Mallya had said in an email to all Kingfisher employees late Sunday night. Accordingly, junior staff were on Wednesday paid a month’s salary. In a bid to bolster confidence, Mallya also said he would be available to address concerns of staff at each major station for one day a week. “Please stand by me. Let’s not become fodder for the media and competition to feed off.”
Fearing that this might be another empty assurance, pilots initially threatened to go on strike if salaries were not paid by Tuesday and even appealed to players of Indian Premier League team Royal Challengers, owned by Mallya, to boycott the tournament. But following a late-night meeting with Mallya at his Mumbai residence, the pilots withdrew their threat to strike work and are now waiting to see if their money will finally come through. “We have been through some tough times but we have now been assured that we will be paid,” says captain Sidharth Gaikwad*, who considers himself lucky to have been able to manage with his savings. “Yes, there are people who have struggled, especially the junior staff, but the airline is now making every effort to get things back on track,” he says.
Having regained at least some of his employees’ confidence, it is now up to Mallya to keep his word. With troubles mounting each day, the latest being a confirmation from the chairman of the Central Board of Excise and Customs that there will be no leeway on payment of Rs 60 crore as service tax, getting at least his staff to support him will not hurt.
*Names of all Kingfisher Airlines crew and pilots have been changed on request