Solomons to cut workforce by 20%

Solomons – Solomon Airlines (IE, Honiara) has announced that it will lay off 59 staff members, thus reducing the size of the company by 20%. “There is no escaping the fact that our operation will be smaller for some time to come and we will not require and cannot sustain the employment of our pre-COVID workforce of 320 people. Regrettably we must now retrench a number of staff members. We will also begin to engage some of the remaining employees on a job rotation basis – one month on/one month off to share work opportunities,” Chief Executive Brett Gebers said. Gebers explained that the suspension of international operations, currently scheduled to continue at least through October 2020, and “very limited domestic flying” were not sufficient to sustain the company financially and further cuts were necessary. He also hinted that “some airlines” were not expecting to resume international operations before 2021, suggesting that the October 2020 restart of the key services could be postponed. “Already many of our Solomon Airlines employees and management have been stood down without pay and we have been operating with a skeleton workforce on half-pay. We are conscious that all of our staff are seeking advice on both their futures and that of the airline itself,” Gebers said. The sole Solomonian scheduled carrier currently uses its turboprop fleet of one Dash 8-100 and three DHC-6-300s to ply domestic routes connecting various islands of the archipelago. Meanwhile, the carrier’s sole A320-200 is used to operate repatriation charters to other countries in the region, including Australia and China, as well as for cargo charters.