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The Emirates plans to offer up to four months of unpaid leave to pilots and flight attendants as the coronavirus pandemic continues to decimate demand for foreign air travel.
The license offers, first reported through Reuters, come after the airline cut thousands of jobs and cut wages in June and July. According to Reuters, eligible workers would take four months off between August and November and still get benefits, adding housing.
While airlines around the world have experienced modest increases in domestic and, in some cases, regional demand, maximum long-haul demand remains limited through various restrictions and anxieties.
Emirates, founded in Dubai, operates only foreign flights. The state-owned airline operates a long-haul global hub-and-spoke system, transporting passengers between remote foreign destinations, connecting its Dubai hub.
Although the airline achieved some revenue in flux due to strong demand for air cargo, it largely immobilized its largest passenger aircraft – the Airbus A380 – and reduced its routes and frequencies.
In an interview with Business Insider the previous month, UAE President Tim Clark said the airline was looking to balance staff desires with the cave in passenger traffic revenue.
“We’ve kept our people as productive as possible,” Clark said. “Management reviews it every week. We are hunting in our monetary situation, we are hunting on what we can and who we can and how much we can stay at the moment.”
One complication, Clark said, is that the Emirates is based on a compound primarily of foreign citizens.
Emirates cabin crews make up an average of 15 nationalities and the maximum number of foreign personnel depend on the airline for the visa to live in Dubai. Losing a task regularly means wasting that visa and returning to a country of origin where the aviation labour market would possibly be limited or non-existent. If they can come back: Clark said the airline was helping fired staff who could not return home due to restrictions and cancellations of pandemic-related flights, adding monetary assistance.
“We are very, very alive to the fact that this is hugely difficult for the workforce because predominantly they’re expatriate and they’re not in their country of domicile, which means they have to be repatriated to where they come from, and a situation which is pretty stark in terms of future employment.”
Meanwhile, Clark said, his airline is emerging mechanisms to speed up the rehiring procedure for laid-off personnel whenever there are enough bounces to make that possible. “If things speed up or later,” he says, “we’ll bring them back so fast that their feet might not touch the ground.”
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