Heathrow Airport asks 2,500 staff to accept pay cuts or HALF may lose jobs

HEATHROW is asking 2,500 workers to accept hefty pay cuts or half may lose jobs due to a travel slump caused by Covid-19.

The cuts – which will work out as 15 to 20 per cent of salary on average – will affect half it is front line workers in jobs including security, fire and airside operations.

They are a desperate bid to save as many jobs as possible at the airport which employs 5,800.

It has now started a 45 day consultation period on the formal proposals which are designed to move towards pay parity by getting rid of legacy contracts.

Some 2,200 workers will be unaffected or even better off.

Heathrow has promised to guarantee a job at the airport “for anyone who wishes to stay with our business”.

If workers fail to agree to the changes, redundancies loom.

The plans will also see the final salary pension scheme closed.

The airport has lost over £1 billion since the start of this year as the aviation industry was “decimated by Covid-19”.

Heathrow said it needs to “urgently adapt to the new reality”.

It added: “Discussions with our unions have taken place over four months and our final offer is informed by feedback we have received from them.

"But with air travel showing little sign of recovery, these discussions cannot go on indefinitely and we must act now to prevent our situation from worsening.”

“In order to create consistency across our colleague grades,  the proposal we have put forward to unions aligns salaries to the market rate and addresses legacy contact issues which is currently seeing some colleagues paid some £10,000 more than others doing the exact same job."

No one’s salary will fall below the London Living Wage, it said.

Half its 1,000 head office staff are already being laid off.

Thousands of jobs have also gone at UK airlines, triggered by the pandemic.

British Airways alone has axed more than 10,000 staff.

In April, British Airways warned that it needed to cut 12,000 jobs to save the business from going under as many holidaymakers ditch flights in favour of staycations.

At the start of the month, Hays travel announced 878 employees out of 4,500 could lose their jobs.

STA Travel UK has gone out of business leaving thousands of customers chasing refunds.

It is expected that nearly three million British travel and ­tourism jobs are on the verge of disappearing — while the economy is close to losing £142billion from the travel sector.