Airlines to share pay info

Mumbai: India’s struggling local airlines plan to share details of salaries across levels and functions in an effort to moderate salaries. Partly driven by a boom in the aviation business in the country—and the consequent shortage of manpower—salaries, especially of pilots and engineers, have tripled in the past three years.
Rising wage costs and intense competition have wreaked havoc with the profitability of all airlines; Indian carriers ended 2006-07 with losses of around Rs2,000 crore. A captain (a senior pilot) earns anything between Rs4.5 lakh and Rs5 lakh a month as compared with Rs1.5-2 lakh a month three years ago.
The information helps companies rationalize their wage costs and benchmark themselves, in terms of salaries, with the competition.
“Collation of remuneration data will not do any harm to employees. On the contrary, it will help the aviation industry to keep rising costs under control,” said Ajay Singh, director, SpiceJet, a low-fare carrier based in New Delhi.
The airlines are currently collating details of salaries of pilots, cabin crew, flight dispatchers and engineers; this information will go into a database that is being created under the aegis of the Federation of Indian Airlines, or FIA, an industry association.
The move was not targeted at reducing salaries, said a private airline executive who did not wish either his name or that of his airline to be identified. Salaries and jobs are related to the “demand-supply situation,” he added. “Airlines are not sharing remuneration details of a particular employee. We are sharing the salaries paid to various cadres to assess (the) industry average,” he said. The executive also said that the initiative to share data on salaries had got the HR heads of various local carriers talking to each other, something that was inconceivable in the past.
14/10/07 P.R. Sanjai/Livemint