SHAR­LENE RAM­PER­SAD

Caribbean Air­lines (CAL) is set to send home one-third of its staff for the next three months, as the air­line strug­gles to cope with the fi­nan­cial fall­out of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

In a re­lease on Tues­day morn­ing, CAL said it al­so would cut the salaries of those who are paid more than $7,500 a month for eight months, start­ing in mid-Oc­to­ber.

The high­er the salary, the big­ger the cuts, the re­lease said.

The lay­offs will be de­cid­ed on the “role and cur­rent needs of the busi­ness,” the air­line said.

“Con­tin­ued cost re­duc­tions wher­ev­er pos­si­ble, in­clud­ing re­duc­ing con­trac­tors and tem­po­rary work­ers and al­lowances that are not rel­e­vant at this time,” the re­lease stat­ed.

CAL said stan­dard in­dus­tri­al re­la­tions cri­te­ria were used to se­lect the em­ploy­ees who will be tem­porar­i­ly laid off.

“The lead­er­ship team rec­og­nizes the im­pact of these mea­sures on its em­ploy­ees and their de­pen­dents and has put sys­tems in place to sup­port those af­fect­ed.”

The air­line as­sured stake­hold­ers that its cur­rent op­er­a­tions would not be im­pact­ed by the lay­offs.

Al­though the coun­try’s bor­ders re­main closed, the air­line is still op­er­a­tional for do­mes­tic flights be­tween Trinidad and To­ba­go, car­go op­er­a­tions, the Kingston and Bar­ba­dos based com­mer­cial ser­vice, and spe­cial repa­tri­a­tion flights from around the world.