Operational downturn compels Aero Contractors to cut off 60 staff strength
Debt-ridden Aero Contractors Airline, currently under the receivership of Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria (AMCON), has eased away 60 percent of its workforce as part of right sizing model.
The development was communicated vide a letters of redundancy issued to the affected employees during the week.
In a statement released by the Media Consultant to the airline, Mr. Simon Tumba, on Thursday in Lagos, the workers would be paid their pension and severance benefits as soon as possible.
Business Hilights recalls that the airline had been grappling with huge and unrealistic personnel cost as well as other operational challenges worsened by lack of enough aircraft to keep all the workers meaningfully engaged.
The statement said in parts: “The issuance of notification of redundancy is a business decision that will ensure Aero’s survival’.
“The current situation where over a thousand people are basically not engaged due to lack of serviceable aircraft is not sustainable for the airline.
“The huge monthly salary associated with a bloated workforce will eventually kill the airline, which is not the intention of the current government,” he said, nothing that Aero Contractors currently has an aircraft-to-employee ratio of 1:500, which analysts believe is perhaps the worse in the history of global airline industry.
While stressing that government’s intervention in Aero was to save it from total collapse, Tumba revealed that “This decision will immediately reduce the whooping operational cost, which has been stifling Aero; enable the management to bring in more aircraft through savings from overheads and pay for C-checks”.
The statement also revealed that Capt. Ado Sanusi, the Chief Executive Officer of Aero, had also assured the disengaged workers of possible recall on recovery of the company from economic woes.
