KINGSTOWN, St. Vincent (CMC):

Regional carrier LIAT returned to full capacity yesterday morning when disgruntled flight attendants who staged a sick-out on Wednesday reported for duty.

On Wednesday, 24 of the rostered 35 flights attendants across the inter-island carrier's network called in sick, but Corporate Communications Specialist Penny Gomez reported that operations appeared to have returned to normal a day later.

The industrial action on Wednes-day grounded 34 of the island-hopping carrier's 120 flights stranding scores of passengers and causing widespread dislocation with dozens of other flights being delayed out of airports in the airline's 22-island network.

The protest action by the flight attendants did not go down well with airport management or shareholder governments, with St Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Dr. Ralph Gonsalves saying he was 'personally hurt' by the industrial action.

Action was unjustified

Speaking to the Caribbean Media Corporation (CMC) late Wednesday, Gonsavles said, while not casting blame on anyone, he believed that the industrial action was unjustified and a reflection of a breakdown in the airline's industrial relations system.

"It is evident that there is a serious problem in the industrial relations system in LIAT for differences that exist, not to be settled in existing procedures," said the Prime Minister, one of the airline's stoutest defenders in the region.

He said that in the past pilots and flight attendants have not hesitated to contact him when the future of the airline was in doubt, "asking me to please save their jobs", but now appeared unwilling to communicate in the same manner if they believed management was not responding to their concerns.

Poor industrial relations

Gonsalves said if they believed the internal industrial relations machinery was failing, the flight attendants could have forwarded a document to him or any of the other shareholding countries' prime ministers, asking for their intervention.

In addition to St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Antigua and Barbuda, along with Barbados, are the other major shareholders of the airline which recently acquired the assets of its former rival, Caribbean Star.

The Prime Minister said he believed the action taken at the peak Christmas season when LIAT is moving full loads of passengers throughout the region was not proportionate with the grouses, a belief he thinks would be shared by "most reasonable persons".

"After the long struggle to make LIAT survive and for us to have managed to put it in the sky, and make it capitalised to have success, the problem can't be of such a nature, that it can't be settled by dialogue," a disappointed Gonsalves said.

Stanford (Caribbean Star owner Sir Allen Stanford) was not able to close us, but 24 flight attendants did," Gonsalves said.