Ryanair's Maltese subsidiary begins COVID-19 layoffs

Malta Air, a subsidiary of Irish holding company Ryanair Holdings, has started laying off staff due to the financial impact of the coronavirus crisis.

Due to Malta Air's three-month grounding due to the coronavirus pandemic, the company told employees that redundancies were "unavoidable". In a memo to staff sent on May 29, and seen by Malta Today, the carrier said: "We regret to inform you that due to the COVID-19 crisis and the failure of our recent discussions with the ERCs [employee representative committees] to agree reasonable pay cuts, we need to make significant cost-reductions and implement urgent restructuring to protect the viability of our Maltese base."

The memo added that terminations would begin from June 30, with a one-month notice that will be paid in full.

Approximately 20 pilots and 40 cabin crew will be made redundant, out of 179 pilots and cabin crew based on the island. A Malta Air spokesman said: "Due to COVID-19 we are facing a drop in traffic this year of up to 50%. We are doing our utmost to save jobs. We have agreed pay cuts with our pilots, which will be sufficient to avoid job losses, but our cabin crew have to date failed to accept our pay proposals, which means job losses of up to 40 cabin crew are now unavoidable."

The spokesman said the company would continue talks with cabin crew to agree on "pay efficiencies which might reduce or eliminate the need for job losses".

In a memo dated May 27 and signed by Shane Carty, head of human resources at Malta Air, the airline said the delayed recovery of traffic means it expects to carry less than 80 million passengers in 2020 compared with 150 million last year.

At the beginning of May, Ryanair Holdings announced wide-ranging job and salary cuts across all group airlines - Ryanair, Ryanair UK, Malta Air, Buzz, and Lauda. The plans could result in the loss of up to 3,000 mainly pilot and cabin crew jobs, unpaid leave, and pay cuts of up to 20%, and the closure of several aircraft bases across Europe until traffic recovers. The group blamed both the pandemic and a "distorted state aid landscape" in the European Union for the cuts.

The group expects that demand and pricing will not recover to 2019 levels before the summer 2022 season. It plans to resume more scheduled flights from July 1. In its final full-year results statement to March 31, 2020, the group said a loss of over EUR200 million euros (USD217 million) is anticipated for the first quarter and a smaller loss for the second.

Ryanair launched Malta Air in June 2019 intending to carry five million passengers from and to Malta in its first five years, but the coronavirus pandemic has scuppered these ambitions.

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