BARBADOS-LIAT- Regional airline facing resistance to plans for a third base in Trinidad

BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, CMC –The regional airline LIAT says it is encountering some resistance to its plans to establish a new base of operations in Trinidad.

 

Chief Executive Officer Mark Darby, speaking at the end of a six-hour Board meeting late on Tuesday, said the carrier was hopeful the new base could be opened within three months and that commonsense would prevail, adding that LIAT was missing on huge potential earnings by delaying the establishment of the third base.

 

"We've carried out a study looking at the relative benefits of opening the base, frankly the business case for doing so is so strong that every month that we miss opening the base we are probably losing somewhere between one and two hundred thousand US dollars, so the financial case is very, very strong.

 

"We have every incentive to move forward on the new base as quickly as possible," Darby added.

 

But the chairman of the LIAT Airline Pilots Association (LIALPA), Captain Michael Blackburn, said while the carrier was within it's right to establish a base in Trinidad, it must first address the concerns of the workers who would be expected to move there.

 

"The collective agreement with LIAT allows the company to open bases, but it is so structured that to move a pilot out of the existing bases requires an agreement with LIALPA as far as the money is concerned," Blackburn said.

 

"Our contract for examples provides for a specific salary for the Barbados base, it provides a specific salary for the base in Antigua and it must have a specific salary agreed to by the Association for Trinidad.

 

"There are various issues in our contract that will come to bear…so it wouldn't be a question of the company just deciding that they want to open and base and that's it," Blackburn added.

 

Other issues articulated by LIALPA include the personal security of workers who would have to move to Trinidad and the cost of living in that country.

 

But Darby pointed out that LIAT continued to incur huge bills in Trinidad for the provision of nightly hotel accommodation for 24 crew members.

 

"That's expensive, and also it's inconvenient for the crew, it means that more and more of them are spending nights away from home so we feel this is a strong business case and also a case for our employees for making the changes," he said.

 

"A lot of the people that will be affected only recently joined LIAT, they joined from Caribbean Star or other airlines and they joined in the full knowledge that we were planning to set up the base in Trinidad.

 

"In fact some people left us recently because we'd been slow in setting up the base in Trinidad so we have every interest in getting on and starting up the base as quickly as possible."

 

LIAT's chairman Jean Holder said he was confident that the concerns of workers would be addressed.

 

"I can assure you, as the chairman of this company, that we will be operating within all the due processes of the company and I know that the pilots and the cabin attendants, as reasonable people, will want to facilitate the process.

 

"We are not going to be operating outside the boundaries of the collective agreement. The board has been presented with commercially sound reasons to opening a third base, we have been given quantitative numbers to suggest that significant savings will be made and obviously the management is accountable to us for those projections," Holder added.

 

CMC/db/pr/08