ZIMBABWE-TRANSPORT: Rest Room Turned Cockpit

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Lewis Machipisa

HARARE, Mar 19 1997 (IPS) - The strike by Air Zimbabwe pilots entered its sixth day of turbulence Wednesday with the fliers favouring to report for duty in their rest room rather than the cockpit.

Some 74 pilots stopped work Mar 14 demanding an unspecified salary increment awarded last year through collective bargaining. Clad in their attractive blue and white uniform, the pilots have spent the past six days in their rest room at the corporation’s headquarters.

Although the pilots say they are not on “strike” and are “turning up for duty in full uniform and ready to fly”, officials of the airline are treating the pilots’ action as a strike.

The pilots also complain of poor working conditions when they compare themselves with their counterparts in the region who are better paid. Last year about six pilots from Air Zimbabwe joined other airlines mainly in the Southern Africa region.

David Mwenga, public relations manager of the state-owned carrier told IPS Wednesday following marathon meetings with the pilots’ representatives that there were no real signs of a conclusion to the negotiations to end the work stoppage which has brought the national airline to its knees.

“We hope we will resolve the issue as soon as possible. At the moment we cannot pay the pilots. We understand that the pilots are not getting as much as we would want them to, but at the moment our financial position does not allow us to award them increases,” Mwenga told IPS.

“We would like to defer payment until the corporation can meet their demands. We are not making as much money as we want to,” said Mwenga. “We don’t want to be antagonistic. We respect these guys and we both want to fly our passengers and so we must continue to talk.”

So far more than 100,000 U.S. dollars — a tenth of the 1995/96 estimated operating profit — has been spent on chartering aircrafts to minimise inconveniences and delays.

For an airline which usually forks out hundreds of thousands of dollars to put up passengers at hotels because of scheduled flight delays, cancellations, or the reallocation of aircraft to travelling government delegations, the strike action has effectively restricted the much needed recovery.

“This will obviously leave us in a far much worse situation,” admitted Mwenga.

The pilots’ action comes barely five months from the last industrial strike by engineers and technicians, also over salary increments.

According to a local economist, it is unfair for Air Zimbabwe pilots to compare their salaries with those of other pilots in the region, especially countries with larger economies.

“For example, South Africa’s economy is many (20) times larger than that of Zimbabwe and the cost of living there much higher than here,” he said.

Some analysts say the latest action by the pilots is likely to force the government to move faster to commercialise the ailing corporation.

According to Simon Moyo, Transport and Energy Minister, the cabinet has already endorsed his ministry’s plans to transform the airline from a parastatal to a commercial company.

Earlier this month, Singapore indicated that it was willing to help Zimbabwe in the restructuring and manpower development of Air Zimbabwe in order to uplift the national airline’s service.

Although Peter Chikumba, acting managing director of the ailing corporation told a local daily ‘The Herald’ that the corporation was not broke, a local weekly, ‘The Independent’ ran a story the same day the pilots stopped work quoting a financial report in which Chikumba admitted that the airline had gone bankrupt.

In the report on the financial position of Air Zimbabwe, Chikumba said the core business of the airline had failed to “operate profitably”, which meant that the airline was unable to meet the salary increment demands of its pilots and engineers.