CYPRUS Airways pilots grounded the airline’s planes for four hours yesterday so that they could all meet and sign legal suits against the company board, for unilaterally cutting their wages by 9.0 per cent this year. Their union PASIPY argued that it had agreed to the pay-cut for 2011 and was not consulted by the board before it decided to keep it in force this year.
It is the kind of irresponsible behaviour we have all come to expect from the airline’s overpaid and pampered pilots, who could always been relied on to put their personal interests above the company’s. Back in 2005, when the company cut wages as part of a rescue plan, the pilots again sued, on the grounds that they had not given their consent. We do not know whether these lawsuits were eventually withdrawn or decisions were still pending, but it gives a good idea of the pilots’ mentality.
And they have never shied away from causing disruption, grounding planes during the peak tourist season, over the most trivial disputes. Of course, in those days, the future of the airline was not at stake, the taxpayer always on hand to bail it out and guarantee the princely salaries of the pilots and the rest of the staff. This has all changed now and although the other CY unions, which have been equally irresponsible in the past, have realised it and agreed to the extension of the wage cut, the pilots remain in denial.
Even labour minister, Sotiroulla Charalambous, a champion of union interests, has turned against PASYPI, publicly slamming its intransigence. PASYPI has defended its behaviour, by accusing management of not having a rescue plan in place, to justify the wage cuts; no decisions had been taken regarding redundancies or cost-cutting measures, it argued. But even if this were correct, it justifies neither the strike nor the taking legal action against the board.
The question is what do the pilots hope to achieve with their actions? Do they think there is a possibility that management would cut the wages of all CY staff by 9.0 per cent, and leave the salaries of the company’s highest-paid workers untouched? This is unlikely to happen and the only thing the pilots would have achieved would be to bring the closure of the company, the survival of which is in the balance, a few months closer.
If PASYPI think that an investor could be found to pour tens of millions of euros into the company and carry on paying pilots the salaries that helped take the company to the brink of bankruptcy, they need to wake up and forget the good old days or they won’t have a job.
