Dozens of aging Middle East Airlines (MEA) employees squeezed into a small conference room at Beirut International Airport on Monday to protest against impending layoffs among surplus staff at the loss-making carrier, The Daily Star reported.
According to the Lebanese paper, all three MEA labor unions said that such redundancies were unnecessary and unfair.
Hussein Abbas, head of the MEA Employees Union, which represents the general staff, told the daily that it was “unrealistic” to blame the company’s financial troubles entirely on excess staff, noting that a recent report by The International Finance Corporation, the private-sector arm of the World Bank, recommended layoff of more than one-quarter of the 4,100 employees who run its nine leased airplanes.
He said this was an attempt to conceal the real reasons for the decline of Lebanon’s once-proud national carrier bad management.
For his part, the Lebanese transport minister Najib Mikati has promised to restructure the airline, which is 99 percent owned by the Central Bank and one percent by the employees, with a view to finding a strategic investor for it by the end of the year – Albawaba.com
