Labour PS Beatrice Kituyi charged that Kenya Airways had acted in a ‘‘cruel and barbaric’’ manner by giving the employees only two days to decide whether to opt for early retirement or be forced out through retrenchment.
Ms Kituyi was clearly playing politics. The committee is also playing politics by purporting to have the powers to countermand what the management of Kenya Airways has decided to do.
When she appeared before the Parliamentary Committee on Labour last week, Labour PS Beatrice Kituyi accused the management of Kenya Airways of acting unkindly by communicating with retrenched employees through SMS’.
She charged that Kenya Airways had acted in a ‘‘cruel and barbaric’’ manner by giving the employees only two days to decide whether to opt for early retirement or be forced out through retrenchment.
Ms Kituyi was clearly playing politics. The committee is also playing politics by purporting to have the powers to countermand what the management of Kenya Airways has decided to do.
There is no such a thing as retrenchment with a human face. Losing a job is very painful, no matter how well you sugar-coat it.
In an environment of widespread job insecurity, an economy that is fast losing its capacity to create new jobs, you cannot send a whole 600 people to the streets at one go without having to face the political pressure and flak such as the management of Kenya Airways is grappling with right now.
Never before has job insecurity been so acute in this country. In the past we had stringent laws governing redundancies and retrenchment.
A company wishing to implement redundancies had to seek the approval of the government. The controls were dismantled when we adopted liberalisation policies in the 80s.
The rights of a private company to retrench cannot be gainsaid. I don’t believe that jobs have to be protected at all costs. They must, first and foremost, be productive.
Capitalism is about constantly juggling with the factors of production — land, labour, and capital — to make maximum profits.
Bloated staff
In this day and age, we cannot return to the ancient regime of controls on redundancy and retrenchment.
I don’t believe that some bureaucrat sitting on an armchair and carrying a big title, or even a parliamentary committee — should dictate to a private company how and when to retrench part of its bloated staff.
But as a nation, there is a bigger picture that we must constantly look at. In a country like ours with no system of unemployment benefits, we must get worried when we see too many companies resorting to retrenchment.
We risk creating widespread hopelessness in the economy. We must not forget that widespread job insecurity and unemployment always come with upsurges in social maladies such as crime, alcoholism, breakdown in marriages, and high suicide rates.
There is also a political angle to it. Getting jobs for relatives, political supporters, and cronies is one of the tools that the political elite use to get legitimacy to rule.
When you send too many people to the streets, you undercut the basis of legitimacy for the political elite. It does not surprise that the parliamentary committee on labour is taking such a strident view of the retrenchments by Kenya Airways.
At the end of the day, we must put these retrenchments in a global context. The world over, airlines are sending people to the streets in large numbers. Here are a few examples.
In May, Virgin Atlantic announced that they were dropping the London-Nairobi route. They cited ‘‘external’’ factors including the high price of fuel, high aviation taxes in the UK, and insufficient passenger numbers. The airline has 32 staff working in Nairobi office who will soon be declared redundant.
In January Austrian Air, citing high fuel and airport taxes, forced employees to sign new contracts. In February, American Airlines cut 33,000 out of 88,000 jobs.
The same month Qantas, the Australian airline — citing industrial action costs and competition — laid off five per cent of its cabin crew, cut routes, and offered voluntary redundancy to its employees. Many others have been on this path. Clearly, KQ is not without company.
