News: Aero Contractors Recalls 350 Workers from Redundancy

Aero Contractors Nigeria Limited has recalled about 350 of its workers who were placed on redundancy earlier this year.

The Chief Executive Officer, Aero Contractors, Capt. Ado Sanusi, who stated this on Thursday, said 200 people were recalled three months after he took over, 120 technical employees were also recalled when the company opened its Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul facility and 30 others were called back to manage the airline’s substations.

The airline, which is under receivership by the Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria, had in March issued letters of redundancy to about 60 per cent of its total workforce, saying it had been grappling with huge and unrealistic personnel costs as well as other operational challenges worsened by lack of enough aircraft to keep all the workers meaningfully engaged.

Sanusi stated, “When I took over eight months ago, Aero had only one aircraft and over 1,300 workers feeding on the aircraft, and they had not been paid salary for seven months. It was not possible to continue that way; we decided to keep only a few people.

“After three months, we brought three aircraft back to the fleet, so we brought back about 200 people from redundancy. We called another 120 on contract when we started the MRO, and 30 others to oversee our substations. Currently, we have about 400 members of staff.

“We are looking at making the 120 people permanent staff members as demand for maintenance services increases. There is also potential to bring more people back but that will depend on the number of planes in our fleet. We are working on having four more Boeing airplanes in our fleet by mid-2018.”

Sanusi said the management of the airline had also paid N300m out of the N2.2bn redundancy claims, adding that from early next year, N20m would be set aside monthly to settle the claims.

He added that the management was working with AMCON to bring in investors as a long term plan to revive the airline.

Source: The Punch