Dwight Nelson, vice-president of the Bustamante Industrial Trade Union, fields questions from reporters at a meeting with Air Jamaica's management and the BITU-affiliated Jamaica Airline Pilots Association at the Ministry of Labour, North Street, central Kingston, yesterday. - WINSTON SILL/FREELANCE PHOTOGRAPHER
IT WAS the Jamaica Airline Pilots Association (JALPA) which last week broke off talks with Air Jamaica, an airline industry source told The Gleaner.
The money-losing national carrier has been holding talks with major stakeholders since the government took back control over it at the end of last year. The airline has chalked up US$800 million (J$49.3 billion) in liabilities and needs to cut its costs in order to survive.
"We have been looking at variation in work rules since January," the source said. "Last week JALPA broke off talks on this."
Some agreement had been reached on cuts in the basic salary of the pilots allowing for a small reduction of about 6 per cent. But the talks foundered when it came to the other elements in the pilots' compensation package.
The issue is not an easy one for the highly-paid pilots to swallow because the changes would mean a US$12 million (J$744 million) cut in their pay package. The airline now has 180 pilots, a reduction from 220 in December, so the average pilot would end up losing millions of dollars in compensation.
With the breakdown in negotiations, Air Jamaica decided to make the pilots redundant and hire those willing to work on better terms for the airline.
The breakdown in talks has had serious consequences as JALPA is a Bustamante Industrial Trade Union affiliate. When the union called the Ministry of Labour to arbitrate the talks and that failed on Sunday, the BITU announced the following day that it was pulling out of a Memorandum of Understanding signed by Jamaica's public sector union representatives and the Government.
That threat to the country's financial and labour relations stability has prompted the Government's current push to try once again to hammer out an agreement with the pilots.
The new negotiations started on Wednesday are likely to be very difficult. The pilots have been refusing to make the changes in their work rules from February last year when a JALPA negotiating team hammered out an agreement with the then AJAG management team involving some of the elements now under discussion. That agreement was subsequently repudiated by the JALPA executive.
