SAA retrenches most of their senior white male pilots
 

In a stunning display of reverse racism, South African Airways, which recently exited the equivalent of USA Chapter 11, has retrenched most of the white male pilots who were the most senior pilots in the airline.

SAA has not operated scheduled flights since April 2020 and stopped all operations around August 2020. The SAA pilots union, SAAPA, was locked out by the company in December 2020 due to various disputes between the airline and the union, the main one being that the airline was insisting on the cancellation of all agreements, including the agreement regulating the seniority list. The union then declared a retaliatory strike.

They also did not pay any of the locked-out pilots when other pilots, all non-white, received payment after resigning from SAAPA to join another union. They also refused to allow pilots to take early retirement in order to access their pensions. They basically engaged in a strategy aimed at starving out the remaining pilots.

SAAPA finally relented when it became apparent that many pilots were in severe financial distress and were considering resigning to access their pensions and that they would lose out on severance packages if they did so.

SAA then broke up the pilot group into 8 demographic categories, being white male, white female, black male, black female, coloured male, coloured female, indian male and indian female. They then assigned quotas for Captains and FOs to each category. They rehired 88 pilots based on these quotas. Many white male pilots opted not to accept employment, especially when former long-range Captains were being offered FO positions and pilots from other demographic groups, who were many hundreds of seniority positions below them, and half their age and with a fraction of their experience were being offered immediate command. They would then have to fly as FOs with pilots who were once their FO or even their relief pilots. There are some white male Captains, with up to 25 years at SAA, who accepted the FO positions out of pure desperation to have an income and to remain current, albeit it at a quarter of what they were earning previously, and who are now being downgraded to FO. There are some new Captains who have only been with SAA for 6 years who will now take their positions and who will sit in the left seat with them in the right seat.

All other categories of employees at SAA were rehired based on LIFO (last in first out) but not the pilots. Experience and seniority for pilots was not a consideration at the new SAA.

As an example, for one white married pilot couple, the husband is senior to his wife, and both were FOs, but the husband is now retrenched and the wife is getting her command.

The airline has also stated that in the future, where pilots are required to fill quotas in a specific demographic group, they will look outside the airline if there are no pilots in the airline, in that demographic group, capable of filling the positions. Essentially, what that means, is that most, if not all, of the white male FO's, most of whom were Captains, will never get command again.

It's the elephant in the room that you can't discuss but it's been the trend in the U.S. for years.

For example, at United Airlines:

Most senior equals most expensive.
For a company restructuring out of bankruptcy that could be important.

There is a massive difference between quotas (illegal in UK) and targets (legal in UK). Appreciate we are not talking about UK here.

EXPENSIVE

If expensive equals white then that’s synchronicity and does not equal racism.
It could but that’s impossible to prove in court.

What if it’s not?

There’s no such thing as “reverse racism”. It’s just racism.

...or you can look at the age cohort that the white, male pilots were hired into. If they are 'senior', I seriously doubt that there would have been too many black, coloured, Indian or indeed female pilots that joined them when they came in as 'number-eff-all' on the seniority list. I'm not suggesting that any present-day reverse racism makes up for the practices back then - but I am suggesting that they are the most expensive, and that those are the first to go in a re-structure, irrespective of their skin colour.

There is a surprising amount of justification and apologetica here for the actions against the white pilots of SAA.
For those who have no idea about what is going on in South Africa, and has been for quite some time now, white people are being pushed out of the salaried workforce in every industry and field. This is not only in public organizations but in large corporations as well. Young whites in South Africa today have a choice of either starting their own business or emigrating that's it.
What has happened to the white pilots of SAA has nothing to do with how (airline) companies manage bankruptcies. It has everything to do with racism.
A lot of people are uncomfortable with facing that fact, but there it is.
SAA used to be one of the leading airlines in the world. It was right up there with the great legacy carriers, in their heyday. Not only during the years of the apartheid regime, but also after Mandela had taken power.
It has systematically been run into the ground. Plundered for its gold and left an empty husk by those appointed by the government to run it.
It's quite a tale in itself - if you're interested, google it.
Handing thriving free-market economies to Marxist guerrilla organizations never has really worked out too well, despite the romance that a lot of people seem to see in it. Sub-Saharan Africa has seen a well-documented pattern of how that has worked since the early 1960's.
One's heart can only go out to those pilots in their 50's and 60's who are now destitute and must requalify, find work in another country, at the bottom of any seniority list if they are fortunate enough to find work, and leave everything behind in the country they grew up in.

Not much future for whites in that part of the world, at least the pilots fare is better than the white farmers, that left with nothing if they were lucky. Racism yes, state sponsored. Those that do remain will only have work as long as it suits the government

Hope you fellas have some umbrellas cause it be rainin' planes soon!

This quota thing is nonsense. People should be hired and retained by any industry, based on performance, qualification, and job-specific traits. Race, skin color, and gender must not play a part.

Hear, hear!

On pure safety grounds, I would never fly on an airline that "hired and retained" pilots based on "race, skin color [sic], and gender" rather than "performance, qualification, and job-specific traits".

Empty Cruise

But it was white people (mostly male) who created SAA. So why would it not be the case that they favoured their own kind? And why it was so successful in its early days - and now a catastrophic chronic failure?

Anyway good luck to the newly racially entitled owners - you were given a very good start…