Trade union urges Jet to pay salaries to employees

The Bharatiya Kamgar Sena (BKS), the trade union wing of Shiv Sena, yesterday said Jet Airways must find ways to pay the salaries to its employees.
“We requested the CEO to find ways for salary payment and protect the jobs of employees,” said BKS leader Santosh Chalke, after he met the airline chief Vinay Dube. Chalke claimed to have about 5,000 Jet Airways employees as BKS members.
Two days back, a Bharatiya Janata Party Lok Sabha candidate from West Bengal, Samik Bhattacharya, wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking his intervention. Chalke said that the CEO had expressed his inability to do anything about salary payment given the financial crisis.
“He said that only SBI (State Bank of India) and other lenders can find a solution to the problem,” Chalke said. Jet Airways last Wednesday suspended its operations indefinitely, putting a question mark over the fate of over 20,000 employees.
The airline’s revival now depends on a successful stake sale initiated by lenders led by the SBI.
In an official statement, the airline lenders led by SBI has said that they were “reasonably hopeful” that the stake sale process would succeed.
Meanwhile, a plea was filed in the Delhi High Court yesterday seeking the immediate solution to consumer complaints in the wake of the Jet Airways crisis.
The application was filed by consumer rights activist Bejon K Misra, whose earlier plea seeking capping of airfares charged by various airlines in the country, is still pending in the court.
In yesterday’s interim application, the petitioner claimed that passengers had been severely affected due to the sudden suspension of Jet Airways services and wanted the government to ask the airline to give a full refund on their tickets with a reasonable compensation or to arrange for an alternative travel for them to reach their destinations.