Almost 200 Comair workers face retrenchment

Almost 200 Comair airline employees are facing retrenchment — a move that will result in the continued jobs bloodbath that has put SA’s unemployment rate at 29%.

The company has served workers with the notice to retrench them, the National Union of Mineworkers of SA (Numsa) said in a statement on Wednesday.

The union has vowed to fight the planned retrenchments, saying workers should not be punished for poor management of the company.

Comair told workers the planned retrenchments were not as a direct result of Covid-19, Numsa said.

The workers would lose their jobs because of the grounding of the company’s Boeing 737 MAX 8 fleet, volatile fuel prices, a weak rand and poor fleet availability due to various factors, including extensive maintenance delays resulting in a need to lease additional aircraft, resulting in significantly increased operating costs.

Numsa spokesperson Phakamile Hlubi-Majola said the company also said increased maintenance costs, over-capacity in the market, over-staffing, both at executive and other employee levels, and inefficiencies were some of the contributing factors that led to Comair serving workers with the notice to retrench workers.

The retrenchment plan has infuriated Numsa, which on Wednesday said there was no genuine need for.

In its correspondence to employees, the company denied that its decision had anything to do with the economic lockdown as a result of the spread of the global Convid-19 pandemic, saying: “While the spread of the Covid-19 virus and the consequent global health crisis has had multiple effects, including economic effects, the proposed restructuring is not as a result thereof.” 

Hlubi-Majola said the union was not convinced about the need for such huge job losses.

“In terms of their initial application for section 189 they said the spread of the Covid-19 virus has no bearing on the decision, but in their communication to staff, they claim that they can’t afford the lockdown, which is why they have applied for temporary relief through the unemployment insurance fund. We do not believe the management of Comair.

“We think this is another example of a private company using the Covid-19 pandemic to justify restructuring of the organisation for its own commercial gain. It seems clear that Comair is determined to profit during this process while workers and their families suffer.

“Workers and their families are suffering for the failure in leadership. We condemn them with the contempt they deserve and Numsa will do all it can to fight for workers and their rights and try to prevent as many job losses as we can,” she said.

With no commercial flights permitted anywhere in SA for at least the next two weeks, the full impact is hard to gauge. There are already casualties and more will follow.

Bankrupt state-owned carrier SA Express grounded itself more than a week ago, and while the plan was for SAA’s business rescue practitioners to reveal their turnaround strategy for the airline this week, it could not be established at the time of writing whether that had been postponed because of the lockdown.

While Comair could not be reached for comment on Wednesday, hours before President Cyril Ramaphosa’s announcement of SA’s three-week lockdown last week and days after announcing the sudden departure of two senior executives, Comair revealed it was embarking on the retrenchment process.

“Despite our efforts over the past few months to preserve cash, maintain liquidity, divestment from non-performing acquisitions, aggressive cost reduction across the group, taking back control of the fleet and unlocking further operational efficiencies, more remains to be done,” CEO Wrenelle Stander said in a statement at the time.

DispatchLIVE’s sister publication, BusinessLIVE, reported last week that investors had known for some time that the airline was facing difficulties and that its first-half results exposed the possibility of it making an annual loss for the first time in its 73-year history. — additional reporting by BusinessLIVE.