British Airways has started carrying out its threat to fire and rehire thousands of workers – days after unions joined talks with a plan to save jobs. Long-serving cabin crew were served notice this week to either accept an enhanced redundancy package within three weeks, or risk losing it by reapplying for a similar job at much lower pay. BA is looking to cut up to 12,000 jobs from its staff of 42,000, after grounding most flights during the pandemic and warning that business is unlikely to recover to pre-Covid-19 levels until at least 2023. BA had told its senior crew that, if rehired, their pay would be only 80% of current basic in a new single fleet. The airline currently operates with two “fleets” of crew – longstanding staff and a lower-paid “mixed fleet”, which critics accuse BA of setting up to undercut pay and conditions during the strikes of 2010-11. BA now wants to merge the two into a single lower-cost fleet. But the small print now shows that in a new single fleet the basic pay of the longstanding crew would be frozen permanently and eroded by inflation. They may also be rehired at a lower rank, losing a further 10%. Flight pay and allowances, which make up a substantial part of crew earnings, would also be slashed. Another effective 8% pay cut will be enforced by a mandatory month of unpaid leave. The notifications were sent to thousands of employees across the business this week, despite top-level meetings between BA and Unite at the weekend, where the union is understood to have laid out proposals to save jobs.<br/>
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Royal Jordanian Airlines has posted a pre-tax and net loss of JD25.4m ($35.8m) for Q1, five times the figure recorded last year. The company recorded a 21% fall in revenues to JD114m, including JD87m from scheduled passenger services, but only a 6% reduction in expenditure to JD117m. Royal Jordanian turned in a quarterly operating loss to 31 March of JD17m, contrasting with a profit of JD4m in the same period of 2019. It says the Jordanian government’s decision to suspend passenger services to and from Jordan from 17 March has “significantly affected” the carrier’s revenues to “unprecedented levels”. The cancellations led to ticket refunds totalling some JD19m over the accounting period.<br/>