Tamil Nadu

Cabin crew air anxiety and fear

— Photo: A.MURALITHARAN

Worried lot: A cabin crew member shares her concerns with the media in Chennai on Thursday.

TAMBARAM: “We feel cheated,” said a cabin crew member of Jet Airways, summing up the mood of several hundreds of her colleagues all over the country who have been retrenched by the private airliner.

Over 20 cabin crew members of Jet Airways, who gathered outside the counter of the airliner at the Chennai Airport Thursday evening, said they were not protesting but just expressing their concerns to the management.

“Some of us are less than six months old in the organisation. A batch of us came to Chennai only five days ago. On Wednesday evening we went to the base to find out our schedule of flights when we were informed that letters had been sent to our homes and that is when we realised our fears had come true,” one of the members told .

Shocked at the development and upset over the manner in which they were forced out of their jobs, the cabin crew members said some of them had spoken to senior employees in the Chennai office on Wednesday evening, but did not get a satisfactory answer. “We were not even told, rather we had to find out that were retrenched,” a member said.

She recalled that top executives of the company had earlier announced that neither the jobs nor the salary of the crew would be touched and this large-scale retrenchment was completely unfair for young men and women who had just begun their career. “This is a clear case of exploitation,” the employee said, adding the retrenched youth were yet to decide on their future course of action.

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