Embattled airline operator Comair said a creditors meeting to vote on a crucial business rescue plan will go ahead on Friday, despite a union attempt to derail it.
The airline’s spokesperson, Stephen Forbes, said he had it on good authority that the creditors meeting “to vote on the business rescue plan” will go ahead on Friday.
The National Union of Metalworkers of SA (Numsa), which is the majority union at the company, refused to attend a stakeholder meeting on Thursday to prepare for the Friday meeting that will determine the future of the airline, saying it was not adequately consulted on the choices presented by the rescue practitioners. Numsa also did not sign a proposed collective agreement that it said was needed for the Friday vote by creditors to go ahead.
Numsa general secretary Irvin Jim said the business rescue practitioners of the Kulula operator and British Airways franchisee told the union if they did not sign the collective agreement, the business rescue plan would not be approved on Friday and the winding-down of the company would follow.
Winding down a business comes with guaranteed job losses as the process effectively entails liquidating the company by selling off assets to pay creditors.
Forbes said the company had about 2,200 employees, workers who could lose their jobs if the company was wound down.
Jim said his union was “not prepared to sign the agreement under duress and in circumstances where Comair is simply attempting to blackmail workers into signing”.
“Included in the proposed collective agreement is a waiver that the business rescue practitioners want employees to sign. It stipulates that they must waive their rights to any income from April 2020 until December 1 or until the day the airline begins to operate,” said Jim.
“Basically, the business rescue practitioners are amending the terms and conditions of employment and they are attempting to impose these changes without consultation, which is a violation of workers’ rights in terms of the Labour Relations Act,” he said.
Jim said should the business rescue practitioners’ plan go ahead, they envisage an airline with only 1,800 employees, “which means at least 400 workers will be retrenched, and the retrenchment process is expected to be finalised after the business rescue plan has been adopted”.
This has put the workers in a catch 22 situation: while they want the business rescue process to go ahead to save jobs, they also do not want to forgo their salaries and increases negotiated a couple of years ago. Jim said annual wage increases would no longer be applicable if the business rescue plan were approved.
Comair, together with other airlines including SAA and Flysafair, grounded its flights after President Cyril Ramaphosa ordered a nationwide lockdown to slow the spread of Covid-19 in March.
It was facing multiple headwinds and heading for its first loss in more than seven decades, after plunging R564m into the red in the first half of 2020 as cost increases outstripped revenue growth. Its woes also included the unpaid R790m SAA owed to it as well as an order for Boeing planes that have since been grounded over safety concerns.
The company was placed in business rescue at the beginning of May as the effects of the lockdown began to bite.
It is envisaged that Comair could take flight on domestic routes again by December, if its creditors agree on the business rescue plan, which would inject more than R1bn into the airline and allow the return of some of its former executives and directors.
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