HK Express pilots face pay cuts, non-flying staff asked to take unpaid leave

HK Express, Cathay Pacific’s budget carrier, is to cut pilot pay by up to 40% and wants non-flying staff to take 20 days of unpaid leave in the first six months of next year. The new take-it-or-leave-it contracts are part of the low-cost carrier’s latest efforts to cut costs, having earlier ruled out job losses, while last month its parent company limited redundancies to itself and Cathay Dragon. Simon Wu, director of operations at HK Express, told pilots in an internal memo their salaries would be reduced by 25 to 40 per cent when they were not flying, and by “an estimated” 8 to 14% if average flight times were 70 hours monthly. In appealing for employees to help out, Mandy Ng Kit-man, the airline’s CEO, told staff in the memo that the carrier still had a long way to go, “with many challenges ahead of us, and regrettably, what we have done so far is not enough to secure our future”. She added: “This is not something I ask from you lightly. The past year has been a real test of our resilience.” Ng said she would take a 15% pay cut through 2021, while senior directors would take a reduction of the same amount for the first six months of next year.<br/>HK Express has around 200 pilots, and more than 1,000 employees in total. The budget airline has lost HK$1.03b since it was acquired by the Cathay Pacific Group in July last year. HK Express is expected to play an even bigger role in serving Asia, filling the void created by the closure of Cathay Dragon. <br/>