Emirates continues to right-size workforce

dubai — Dubai flag-carrier Emirates made redundant more pilots and cabin crew this week in a fresh round of job cuts warranted by the grounding of its operations in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

Speaking to Khaleej Times, an Emirates spokesperson confirmed on Thursday that the world’s largest wide-body aircraft fleet operator is still in the process of implementing the redundancy exercise across the group, as previously communicated.

Already, the airline has trimmed tens of hundreds of its workforce as part of a massive right-sizing exercise started more than two months ago.

The spokesperson did not say how many employees had been made redundant in this week’s job cuts or from which departments. The airline’s workforce of 4,300 pilots and nearly 22,000 cabin crew could shrink by almost a third from its precoronavirus levels.

“While we have slowly restarted operations wherever it is safe and commercially viable, our footprint today is significantly smaller than before and it will take a while for us to recover to pre-pandemic levels,” the airline spokesperson said.

“Like other airlines and travel companies, Covid-19 has hit us hard, and as a responsible business, we simply must right-size our workforce in line with our reduced operational requirements.”

“Our people have always been a big contributing factor to our success, so this is not an action that we relish, nor one that we take lightly. We continue to take every possible action to reduce costs, restore revenue streams, and preserve jobs,” the spokesperson added.

Mostly Airbus A380 pilots were affected by the job cuts this week, Reuters quoted sources as saying. Emirates chief operating officer Adel Ahmad Al Redha said on June 25 that not all of its 115 Airbus A380s would return to service this year and that the airline needed to review its strategy.