- The SAA Pilots' Association has voted in favour of a strike at the state-owned airline.
- SAAPA has given the airline 48-hours to respond to their demands.
- The terms of retrenching of pilots remain a central issue.
The vast majority of members of the South African Airways Pilots' Association (Saapa) have voted in favour of a strike.
"SAA has cherry picked Saapa pilots who are locked out and whom it now needs for training, and wants to 'unlock' them as and when they deem necessary. They have not paid most of these pilots in a year. We are saying this is unlawful," explained SAAPA chair Captain Grant Back.
"In order for Saapa pilots to remain protected and to exercise their rights in labour law to withhold their services, Saapa has held a ballot in which 98% of the members supported the strike. SAA cannot have it both ways. We are not demanding anything untoward in fact we have demanded to be retrenched and the cancellation of our agreements. Our members must be treated fairly and within the law of the country."
The union has given SAA 48-hours notice as required by the Labour Relations Act. Saapa members have already been locked out by the airline's business rescue practitioners since 18 December 2020.
The demands made in relation to going on strike include that the proposed terms and conditions relating to dismissal of pilots for operational reasons and the notice period as contained in the airline's proposed terms and condition for future pilots, be applied to the section 189 dismissal of current pilots.
Saapa also wants its full Regulating Agreement only to be terminated after the last Saapa member leaves the employ of the airline as a result of the section 189 retrenchment process which started in July last year. According to Saapa, it has already agreed to cancel the Regulating Agreement in October of 2020, but would not accept what it regards as the unlawful manner in which the BRPs wanted to retrench the pilots.
"We hold ourselves open at all times to engage the company and bring an end to this protracted dispute. Saapa will avail itself for a meeting with the BRPs or the company to avert the strike, but if all else fails, we remain unified and ready to meet any challenges," said Back.
"While settlement discussions are ongoing and Saapa is hopeful that an acceptable compromise can be reached with SAA and the BRPs, this action was forced upon the remains pilots of SAA who are Saapa members as they remain the only SAA employees who have not been paid their December 2020 salaries and their 2019 guaranteed 13th cheque, which forms part of their normal remuneration and should have been paid in April 2020."
Back pointed out that these payments have been paid to all employees and pilots who took the voluntary severance packages as well as to pilots who had broken away from Saapa late in 2020.
"The current lockout of Saapa members has no bearing on the payment of these amounts and they cannot lawfully be withheld. The non-payment of these amounts is only an attempt to bring the Saapa membership to its knees and to force them to give in to the unreasonable demands placed upon them," said Back.
"SAAPA hopes that the Special Investigations Unit's revelations into the large scale looting, corruption and procurement rigging at SAA, particularly at SAA Cargo and SAA Technical, have been noted by both the public and the role players in SAA and calls on them to abandon the attempts to paint Saapa members as the cause of SAA's demise."
According to Back, SAA has now realised it actually needs the highly skilled pilots it has locked out and "is attempting to force a selected few back to work, while comically attempting to blame the pilots for the decision to lock them out".
Mashudu Raphetha, general secretary of the recently formed Dynamic People's Union of SA (Dypusa), says 60 SAA pilots are already members and his union only needs the balance to have the full 88 needed for the "new SAA". Dypusa is in talks with the Department of Public Enterprises (DPE) in this regard.
"SAAPA cannot hold SAA ransom with their demands. These pilots cannot be treated with kid gloves," said Raphetha.
SAA's rescue practitioners are in the process of finalising their exit. Then the airline will be handed back to the interim board.
The rescue practitioners indicated that they have no comment at this stage.
UPDATE: In a letter dated 29 March 2021 and seen by Fin24, the rescue practitioners offer SAAPA members a total of R85 million ex-gratia payment in lieu of the termination of the union's Regualtory Agreement.The R85 million equates to one months' salary of 400 pilots and was to be paid over three years for the entire regulating agreements. The offer provides no guarantee of payment should SAA go into liquidation. The union has said in the past that its members' salaries are below international benchmark levels as was shown in a study provided by SAA.
In the letter, the rescue practitioners state that SAA has limited funds for the implementation of the business rescue plan, which include the payment of severance packages to all its employees.
"The payment of an ex-gratia payment to SAAPA members for the purposes of cancelling the Regulating Agreement was not supported by the shareholder [the DPE] and is not currently available in the funding for the implementation of the business rescue plan of SAA," state the rescue practitioners.
"Based on the above, the BRPs initially offered SAAPA a choice of paying in full the accrued leave or alternatively pay the compromised leave pay amount plus the exgratia payment. This offer was rejected by SAAPA. It was for this reason that the BRPs, with the sole purpose of reaching agreement and indulging the demands of SAAPA under very difficult, if not precarious financial conditions for SAA, the BRPs conceded to paying both the accrued leave in full (that is uncompromised) and the full ex-gratia payment, with one proviso: that the ex-gratia payment be paid through the Receivership over a three-year period."
The BRPS say it is in this context that the demand by SAAPA that their severance pay, based on the 2020 terms and conditions of employment, needs to be looked at.
"This demand amounts to an additional R300 million. The notion that there is available an additional R300 million is simply beyond the current available funding. Our approach of preferring the payment of an ex-gratia payment over the payment of the full accrual leave was that this benefit would avoid extending historical unfair tenure benefits arising out of the seniority provisions in favour of a more equitable system for all pilots," state the BRPS.
"Whilst we believe we are relatively close to settling on the outstanding items we are nevertheless concerned at what appears to be an ever-moving target of demands by SAAPA. It is clear that the Regulating Agreement has negative consequences for the restructured airline and if it were to continue it would threaten the commercial viability of the restructured airline in which case the pilots would find themselves with little to no amounts flowing to them."
The offer is only valid until the BRPs exit the rescue process.