Air New Zealand CEO warns of $97mn more wage cuts

Air New Zealand (NZ, Auckland Int’l) CEO Greg Foran has told employees that they should brace themselves for further job cuts on top of 4,000 redundancies already announced as it struggles to cut more costs during the Covid-19 era. The flag carrier needs to reduce its wage bill by a further NZD150 million New Zealand dollars (USD97 million), Foran said in his letter on June 5, the country’s 1 NEWS broadcaster reported. To achieve planned stages to “survive”, “revive”, and “thrive”, the airline will have to implement further cuts, he said. “We are open to exploring all options with unions that help meet our cost-saving goals, but I do want to be clear that we need to brace ourselves for more discussions around leave without pay, reduced hours, job share, and voluntary exits with redundancies as the last option,” he explained. The downsizing aims to take Air New Zealand through to the announcement of its 2021-2022 annual results in August 2022, with the “revive” phase expected to begin from September. “We have set the annual results announcement in late August 2022, which is in around 800 days’ time, as the target date for Air New Zealand to report we are starting to earn healthy profits again even though we may be at only 70% of our pre-Covid-19 size,” Foran said.