News
Korean Air pilots stage more wage protests but airline continues to resist their demands
March 11th 2016
Cockpit disruption continued at Korean Air when more than 200 uniformed pilots staged a rally on Tuesday in front of the flag carrier’s Seoul headquarters, protesting about the growing rift between pilots and management. Read More » The unionized crew also are asking the carrier to agree to a 37% wage increase to cease their work-to-rule action, started in February.
"We are not demanding (money) from a poor person. How could they say we are asking too much at a time when we are demanding just one thirtieth of the chairman's salary," Lee Kyu-nam, head of the Korean Air pilot union said at the rally.
The rift between Korean Air and its pilots has escalated significantly after the carrier sacked a pilot recently. The pilot refused to fly his aircraft back to Seoul from Manila because he had exceeded twelve hours of straight flying that day. Korean Air said the pilot, surnamed Park, had violated the carrier’s flight operation code. Park reportedly plans to appeal his dismissal.
The standoff intensified after Korean Air filed law suits against some union members for holding stickers, "groundlessly" damaging the reputation of the airline and its chairman, Cho Yang Ho. The Chos are no strangers to bad publicity. Senior Cho’s daughter, Cho Hyun Ah, was jailed last year for violating air safety protocol after she forced a company A380 to return to its gate at JFK in New York in the infamous ‘nut rage scandal’.
Korean Air was hit hard by a pilot strike in 2005, which called for a wage increase and management transparency. The strike resulted in huge losses to the company, but evidently not much change.
