IndiGo CEO Ronojoy Dutta writes letter to employees to address salary concerns

Developing sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) is a big challenge and IndiGo is working with the Indian petroleum ministry and oil majors such as Shell and Honeywell UOP on this issue, said the airline's CEO Ronojoy Dutta here.

In a bid to address the growing concerns of its pilots, cabin crew, and commanders, IndiGo's chief executive officer Ronojoy Dutta in a letter to the airline's staff said that IndiGo is constantly reviewing the salaries of its staff and will adjust salaries based on the competitive environment and IndiGo's bottomline.

The email was sent to employees by the CEO on April 8 as there were various media reports saying that there are disagreements between the airline's top management and staff.

"Salaries are a difficult, thorny issue and underlying imperatives are to consider the wage structure in competitive industries," Dutta said in the email.

He added that the aviation industry is dealing with sky-high aviation turbine fuel prices and a recovery in passenger air traffic.

"I want to assure you that the interest of our employees is our utmost priority but at the moment we have to carefully manage a balance between higher costs, higher ticket prices," Dutta said.

The letter comes a week after the airline had partially restored the salaries of its pilots from April 1. IndiGo on April 1st had increased salaries of its pilots by 8 percent.

The airlines had also last week suspended some of its pilots for planning protests against the continued pandemic-time pay cuts. The pilots had planned to go on mass leave from April 5 in protest against the 28 percent pay cuts till last month.

The protests from the airline's pilots come after IndiGo allotted employee stock options (ESOPs) for the financial year 2021 to its top management but left out its pilots and other staff last month.

While, IndiGo had also vowed to restore another 6.5 percent from November 1, 2022, if operations continue to run smoothly, pilots and commanders say that the "so-called" cuts taken by the top management of the airline for the year due to the pandemic have been in effect negated by the generous allotment of stock options.

In May 2020, Indigo has revised their pilot's pay structure to slash salaries by as much as up to 40 percent.

Many of the airline's senior pilots had received emails from the company's leave planner, asking them to choose from two options, each involving a pay cut. One includes a pay structure with 42 annual leaves and the second will have the pilots take one week off every month. They used to have a package that included 22 days of annual leave.

Before this, it revised the contract terms of pilots who were undergoing training, with new terms including up to a 50 percent cut in salaries and a change in rostering.

This was after the carrier had cut pays in varying degree depending on the employee group.