Expats face pay cuts as companies trim costs

New Delhi: Wolfgang Prock-Shauer, the genteel Austrian who runs India’s Jet Airways, had probably never bargained for turbulence hitting his salary. At least not after spending 25 years in the global aviation business and in a world starved of good managers.
But that belief was to be proved wrong. As corporate travelers swapped airport lounges for videoconferencing rooms and low-cost carriers ate into the rest of the business, Jet and other full-service carriers found cash hard to come by and debts started piling up. India's fledgling aviation industry stared at a cumulative annual loss of Rs 10,000 crore.
Mr Prock-Shauer was forced to clean up, and started it with himself. The 52-year-old took a voluntary pay cut of 10% and set an example for the rest. Last November, Jet sacked 32 foreign pilots to save costs as part of its plan to replace all expat pilots, more than a quarter of Jet’s 1,100 pilots are expats, with Indians by March 2010. A foreign pilot is, on an average, paid a monthly salary of Rs 5 lakh a month plus an accommodation allowance of Rs 2 lakh. An Indian pilot is paid just half.
Mr Prock-Shauer and Jet’s foreign pilots may be victims of the peculiar conditions that the company and the Indian aviation sector finds itself in, but thousands of other managers on so-called “expat” postings across sectors are finding that their condition is no better.
31/07/09 Shreya Biswas & Bhanu Pande/Economic Times

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Categories: Foreign Jul 2009, Indian Aviation- In General Jul 2009, Jet Airways Jul 2009