State-owned budget airline flydubai has said it is ready to welcome back a thousand employees. The airline continues to rebuild from the devastating downturn in air travel brought about by the pandemic. While speaking at a keynote session at the Arabian Business Virtual event yesterday, flydubai CEO Ghaith Al Ghaith said that staff was given a choice of either unpaid leave or redundancy as the crisis unfolded. Of the two options, 97% of flydubai staff opted for unpaid leave in the hope of returning to work.
When asked about letting people go because of COVID-19 during an interview, the airline’s CEO said it was one of the most difficult decisions they had to make. According to flydubai’s annual results in 2019, the Dubai International Airport (DXB)-based carrier employed 3,922 people. By the end of December 2020, that number had dropped to 3,796.
When speaking about his delight in being able to bring people back to work, travel and hospitality website Hotelier Middle East quotes the flydubai boss as saying the following:
“We set up a scheme from the beginning of the pandemic, giving people an option of either going on unpaid leave or taking the redundancy scheme. We are proud that 97 % of the people chose to take unpaid leave. I understand that there was no choice for these people, but it was a commitment from them that they wanted to stick to the airline, and we want to stick with them.”
When speaking about his delight in being able to bring people back to work, travel and hospitality website Hotelier Middle East quotes the flydubai boss as saying the following:
“We set up a scheme from the beginning of the pandemic, giving people an option of either going on unpaid leave or taking the redundancy scheme. We are proud that 97 % of the people chose to take unpaid leave. I understand that there was no choice for these people, but it was a commitment from them that they wanted to stick to the airline, and we want to stick with them.”
Al Ghaith said that flydubai supported all its workers as well as it could during the pandemic, saying:
“We had support from all regulatory authorities and partners. People had loans, so we worked with the banks to give them some kind of relief or deferment… The feedback we got during this terrible time of how people valued what we had done was very encouraging that it makes us so proud.”
26/04/21 Mark Finlay/Simple Flying
To Read the News in full at Source, Click the Headline
0 comments:
Post a Comment