Ryanair’s Maltese subsidiary lays off 40 cabin crew

Malta Air (AL, Malta Int’l) and the Mediterranean island nation’s General Workers’ Union have failed to reach a cabin crew “emergency agreement”, resulting in the loss of 40 jobs from January 1, the Ryanair Holdings subsidiary revealed. The carrier said that a possible deal would have included “modest pay cuts (to be restored over four years)” together with a minimum pay guarantee and a three-year review, Malta Air said in a statement on December 22. The dismissals are the equivalent of about a fifth of its workforce of 179 cabin crew and pilots. The airline has been operating at 10% of its capacity yet it was still employing 100% of its pre-Covid cabin crew, the statement claimed. This was an “untenable situation in an industry which has been devastated by Covid-19 and will take many years to recover.” Malta Air currently operates a total of 120 B737-800s, the ch-aviation fleets advanced module shows. “Sadly, without this emergency agreement, which was already agreed by Malta Air pilots, cabin crew job losses can no longer be avoided. As a direct result of the GWU’s failure to deliver upon its agreement with Malta Air, there will be 40 cabin crew redundancies implemented,” the statement outlined. Malta Air had initially warned in a memo to staff on May 29 that around 20 pilots and 40 cabin crew would be made redundant. The union’s deputy secretary general, Josef Bugeja, told the Times of Malta that he did not sign the agreement for two reasons, the date it would take effect and the four-year period to restore pay cuts. “Malta Air wanted the collective agreement to be retroactive from June 2020, which we did not agree with as we pushed for the agreement to begin from the date it was signed,” he said. “We proposed an agreement, which is similar in our law, where we reduce the working conditions for four weeks, but Malta Air said this was not enough.”