Air India brings outside staff to beat stir
Ground handling workers to go on strike at Cochin airport from Monday.
KOCHI: Faced with the prospects of its ground handling operations going haywire with 140-odd contract workers in the section giving notice for an indefinite strike from Monday, the Air India Air Transport Services Limited (AIATSL), the agency in charge of ground handling at Cochin international airport, has requisitioned the services of its workers in Chennai and Mumbai for Cochin airport.
The contract workers of the Khullar Hospitality to which AIATSL has given the sub-contract for the ground handling are resorting to strike from Monday.
The AIATSL had taken contract for handling the ground operations of Jet Airways, Silk Air, Kuwait Airways, Emirates, Malindo and Qatar Airways apart from Air India and Air India Express. The other ground handling agency at Cochin international airport is BWFS which handles the ground operations of 16 other airways operating from the airport.
According to sources at the airport, Air India has been slipping on payment of money due to Khullar and CIAL. The payment was reportedly made to Khullar once in three months.
The workers allege that they are not given their salary on time and also given low wages and that there was no move to revise the wages despite the earlier agreement getting lapsed four months ago.
An AI official said that there was a credit period of two months with Khullar for AI. “We pay our money to them by that time and according to the number of persons deployed. It is for Khullar to renew the agreement with workers if at all they want to. We understand that the workers of Khulllar are better paid than those of BWFS,” said the AI official.
The workers have been on a go-slow strike for the past one week raising these demands and on account of this the flights of the eight airlines, including AI and AIE, got delayed for over 30 minutes.
With the situation getting out of control, the CIAL also gave notice to Air India asking it to sort out the issue. AI officials expressed confidence that the strike will not affect the ground handling operations at the airport with workers deployed from other centres.