Letter: Get tough with SAA

George Dunn of Sheffield Beach writes:

It is common cause that SAA has lost billions of rand and the government continues to bail it out. We learned last week that SAA is technically insolvent and should be shut down. Perhaps this would not be a bad thing.

The reasons for the SAA condition are due to horrendous management from top to bottom, corruption and wastage and, perhaps the biggest factor, the strength of the unions and the inability of top management to deal with their demands.

To highlight this, last week management woke up to the fact that they are employing 1 000+ too many people and stated that they would have to be retrenched. Immediately the union demanded a wage increase, no retrenchments and if their demands were not met, they would strike – which started today! This is costing an already broke SAA R500 million a day!

Needless to say, cost cutting should have started many years ago and whilst – like the SAA management – I am not an expert, the following should surely be considered for implementation:

Immediately stop serving the domestic market allowing independent budget airlines, such as Safair and any new players to service these routes, perhaps absorbing SAA’s domestic fleet and those staff who they consider worthy of employing.

Once domestic is out of the picture perhaps those in their ivory towers will implement a proper agreement to code share with another airline, perhaps Emirates – if they were not put off by the previous back tracking – or sell/close down SAA.

Our hard-earned tax money can be better utilised uplifting all the citizens of this country.

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