The management of Ethiopian has made a salary increment amounting up to 35% to all its employees effective this month.
The salary increment ranges between 15 and 35%, the highest amount going to the aircraft technicians. As the profitability of the airline is increasing, the management has been making salary increments in the past consecutive years.
In the last fiscal year the national flag carrier made a net profit of 1.3 billion birr, a 165% increase compared to that of the previous year. The airline has made salary increments every year for the past five years. In addition to the increase in profitability of the airline, staff turnover has prompted the management to make salary adjustments, especially to the cockpit crew and aircraft technicians.
Recently, the management increased the pilots’ salary of between 100 and 180%. Senior cockpit crew members and technicians have been leaving the airline recently to join Middle Eastern carriers in search of better payment. Although management has managed the exodus of pilots to the Middle East by huge salary increases, the same tactic has not yet stopped the technicians from going to that region. “Currently we are not losing pilots. This year we did not lose any. We have to work more to reduce the staff turnover with the technicians,” Girma Wake, Ethiopian CEO said in an exclusive interview with Aviation News Ltd.
Speaking of the management’s achievements Wake said: “We believed that cutting costs means keeping staff salary at the minimum. And if you pay more you would lose. That kind of thinking was there for many years. Ethiopian airlines increased salaries in the last five years almost every year except one year. Even in that one year the normal increase was given and the company did not lose. In fact, the company became more profitable as the staff output increased. I think the mindset of keeping salaries low the airline would grow is not now in the minds of the board or the management of the airline. Now the mindset is that the staff and the airline can grow together. That change is the other important thing we have done in the past seven years.”
Ethiopian has 5,555 employees about 600 of them are technicians and 325 are pilots, 50 of them are foreign nationals.