From an article in the Times of India:
Jet Air lays off 850 flight attendants
15 Oct 2008, 0042 hrs IST, Manju V,TNN
MUMBAI: The largest lay-off in the history of Indian aviation is expected to take place on Wednesday when as many as 850 Jet Airways cabin crew members, mostly on probation, will receive termination letters. The airline couriered these letters late on Tuesday night.
The tremors brought about by the worst downturn yet in the airline industry were felt on Tuesday itself, hours before the first Jet Airways flight of the day took off. Said a crew member, "About three and a half hours before a flight, the office transport reaches your home to pick you up. In the wee hours of Tuesday morning, hundreds of cabin crew members in Mumbai who were rostered for early morning flights waited in their uniforms to be picked up." When the worried flight attendants called up the airline dispatch office, they were told they had been de-rostered till further notice.
Though the Jet Airways spokesperson declined to comment on the extent of the lay-off, she did confirm that terminations were in the offing. "Because of the slowdown in traffic, both on international and domestic routes, we have announced discontinuation of a number of flights. As a professional organization we had to do a comprehensive rationalization of our network by taking into account the current traffic demand, our capacity utilization, etc. Consequent to this, we will have to release the unconfirmed staff to match up with the changes," the spokesperson said.
Jet Airways has a total of 1,903 cabin crew (as of last week) at its Mumbai base and 850 of them, who will now be "released", were those who were on probation or had put in less than a year and a half in the company. "The rumour doing the rounds here is that more cabin crew lay-offs are on their way. Even the people who de-rostered the crew today fear that they may soon be at the receiving end themselves," said an Jet official, on condition of anonymity.
The retrenched crew are said to have taken it very hard, particularly since they were given a verbal job assurance as recently as two months ago by the top management. Chief commercial officer Sudhir Raghavan in one of his weekly Friday interactions with the cabin crew had said that their jobs were insulated. "Irrespective of whatever cost cuts we make, Mr Goyal has told me not to touch the cabin crew, he had said," a crew member recalled Raghavan saying. "So no one pressed the panic button when Goyal and Mallya made the tie-up announcement," he adds...
Jet Air lays off 850 flight attendants-India Business-Business-The Times of India