COVID-19 crisis: Emirates airline to cut up to 9,000 jobs

Dubai: The Dubai based airline giant, Emirates airline has cut a tenth of its workforce during the novel coronavirus pandemic in layoffs in the last week. Reports say that this layoff could rise to 15 percent or 9,000 jobs.

President of the airlines, Tim Clark said, ” The airline had already cut a tenth of its staff and that Emirates. We will probably have to let go of a few more, probably up to 15 percent.”

Before the crisis hit, Emirates employed some 60,000 staff, including 4,300 pilots and nearly 22,000 cabin crew, according to its annual report.

The Middle East’s largest carrier, which operates a fleet of 270 wide-bodied aircraft, halted operations in late March as part of global shutdowns to stem the spread of the virus. It resumed two weeks later on a limited network and plans to fly to 58 cities by mid-August, down from about 157 before the crisis.

During the time, Clark has said that it could take up to four years for operations to return to “some degree of normality”, and the airline has been staging rounds of layoffs, as recently as last week, without disclosing numbers.

Clark said in the interview that Emirates is not hit as badly off as others. But the crisis hit just as we were heading for one of our best years ever,” added Clark. The airline had reported a bumper 21 percent rise in annual profits in March.

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) has said that airlines are in line to make a combined net loss of more than $84 billion this year in the wake of the pandemic crisis, the biggest in the industry’s history.

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