After salary cuts, LWP policy, Air India to hire more employees

After sending its 600 permanent staff on ‘Leave without Pay’ for five years, the national carrier is now on looking at hiring new people!

The recruitment drive is to hire people for the finance and medical services departments.

The roles in the finance department include that of deputy chief of finance, manager-finance and deputy manager-finance. The positions in the medical services department include that of chief medical officer and senior assistant-medical.

As per the advertisement, the Company has invited applications from Indian citizens, irrespective of their base location, for the posts on a fixed-term contractual basis.

This whole hiring scenario has shown the organisation in a bad light, as it is ethically incorrect for any organisation to lay off people or send employees on leave without pay and then advertise to hire new people immediately after.

This will definitely not go down well with the employees as the pilots and service engineers are still protesting over the LWP policy, rightly calling it a ‘draconian’ scheme.

Interested and eligible candidates have been asked to submit their applications within 15 days.

The Company has, however, justified the cut in allowances of existing employees by citing the precarious financial position it is in due to Covid-19.

Earlier, on July 21, the national carrier, in an internal order had announced the reduction in monthly allowances of its employees by up to 50 per cent, for those who have a monthly gross salary of more than Rs 25,000.

The order also stated that the basic salary and allowances, such as industrial dearness allowance (IDA) and house-rent allowance (HRA) will see no changes.

However, for the general category officers, all other allowances will be reduced by 50 per cent. For the cabin crew, the allowances which include check allowance, flying allowance and quick return allowance will be reduced by 20 per cent.