Outrage after Kenya Airways sacks more than 100 engineers

Kenya Airways has fired 140 employees from its technical department who have been staging a two day go slow pushing for higher pay.The national carriers issued the dismissal letters to the group on Wednesday evening after issuing three warning letters urging the employees to return to work.The striking engineers and technicians are a fraction of the over 600 employees who make up the technical department.

The workers, including those who fuel, maintain and service KQ aircraft, want their pay adjusted upwards to match that paid to their equivalents working for Middle East carriers.

The striking engineers, a fraction of over 600 employees who constitute the technical department, downed their tools Tuesday evening and have declining to tend to the national carrier’s aircraft since.

“Some of our technical staff have downed their tools demanding more pay. None of our flights have so far been affected by this illegal industrial action and they won’t be,” KQ chairman Michael Joseph told the Business Daily Wednesday in an interview.The go slow started on Tuesday with the engineers failing to work on aircrafts in the hangers for repairs and maintenance forcing Kenya Airways to let them go.The firm posted a Sh3.8 billion net loss for the six months to September, a 20.5 percent reduction of their losses same period last year of Sh4.78 billion.This was attributed to the improvement of decreased costs in the period as fleet costs were lower by 21.9 percent while overheads decreased by 8.9 percent.However, the national carrier made flat revenue in the period under review slightly impacted by the election period.Kenya Airways claims technical assistants salaries were increased from Sh120,000 to Sh200,000 while production engineers saw the salaries increased to Sh340,000.The same group had been pushing to have salaries raised to Sh340,000 and Sh1.2 million respectively.Affected employees have not taken kindly to the sacking, accusing the CEO of high handedness in dealing with the salary review issue claiming 200 have been sacked over the go slow.