Turkish Airlines, union spat festers, NUATE wants GM exit from Nigeria

...Carrier’s $6000 fraud allegation by seven Nigerians cooked

The truce brokered by the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) over the face-off between Turkish Airlines and unions in the aviation industry may have yielded no result as the National Union of Air Transport Employees (NUATE) has chided the General Manager of the airline, Lokman Balkan for the way he is handling the issue that saw the union picket the carrier last week

In a statement issued on the development on Monday, the union declared: “We shall instruct all aviation workers not to handle him at any Nigerian airport, except at his exit from Nigeria. If compelled, NUATE shall internationalise his ostracising from the global aviation family.”

The union in its statement attributed its latest decision to the claim by the airline that the seven Nigerian workers sacked was a result of based on their involvement in ticket racketeering.

According to the union, “The Airline gave the impression in the publication that the union, NUATE, was picketing the Airline in the wrongful defence of the workers’ wrongdoings. It also claimed that the Union carried out the picketing despite an interlocutory injunction obtained against the exercise.

“NUATE feels obliged to respond to this awful attempt by the Airline to stand truth on its head. We wish to let the public and stakeholders know that the accusations are blatant and poorly formulated lies. And we wish to tell the truth as follows.”

“In the first place, the claim that the airline lost $600,000 is a mere phantom. What happened is that sometime in April 2023, Turkish Airlines’ headquarters issued a sales restriction circular which allowed sales of only two premium classes of tickets as a response to foreign airlines’ difficulty in repatriating their proceeds to home countries due to foreign exchange constraints in Nigeria. But, in a contradicting manner, the Airline had an advertised fare on the website which was much lower than the permitted fares. Therefore, intending passengers who accessed such fare, but could not pay online was directed by the global call centre to approach the Nigerian offices.

It noted that the workers could not attend to the customers due to the sales restriction, leading the passengers to resort to creating ugly scenes at the sales offices which became riotous at times.

It noted that as an image-saving measure, the then sales manager asked the sales staff to use the PNR obtained online by the customers to process the tickets if the airline’s booking system could route the tickets, adding that the sales staff simply complied.

“The then sales manager, a Turkish national, sold these tickets too to confirm that this was the local management’s approved approach to resolving the problem created by the website.

“The Airline’s accountants received all due monies from all tickets sold and all sales reports were daily submitted to the sales manager, signed by him and the accounts department and scanned to headquarters. If monies were not fully received, the account would not have been balanced, and sales could not have been concluded.

Therefore, no monies belonging to Turkish Airlines are missing. And no staff has taken any monies belonging to Turkish Airlines. Importantly, no staff had any pecuniary benefit from the so-called internet sales”.

“It is, therefore, disingenuous for the General Manager to hold the workers to the charge of failure to comply with the sales restrictions when it is clear that shortcomings on the part of the Airline ICT (on the website) combined with Local Management’s decisions on managing an otherwise ugly situation were responsible for the sales in question.

“It is noteworthy that while the Nigerian staff has been dismissed, the Turkish Sales Manager has been promoted and redeployed, and the ICT of the airline has answered no charges. Talk about racism. What better example than this?

According to.NUATE, the General Manager since his assumption of office in May 2023 had strangely adopted subterfuge and strong-arm tactics to create a stuffy and toxic atmosphere in the Turkish Airlines workplace, saying he has employed threat, intimidation and blackmail to induce fear among the workers to force the workers to worship him as a demi-god.

The union cited how a particular pregnant staff nearly lost her pregnancy after her encounter with the GM and was hospitalized for some time to stabilise.

“This level of wickedness to own staff is abnormal. It is funny to hear Turkish Airlines say that NUATE is disrupting the Airline’s operations despite a restraining order of the court when the whole world knows that it is the Nigeria Labour Congress, not NUATE, which has called the picketing exercise.”

“We wish to use this medium to inform the general public and relevant stakeholders that the real reason for the sack of seven out of eleven employees under these trump-up charges is the continued determination to exterminate the union from the Airline which it started in 2020 when it sacked all the members of the Airline’s Branch Executive Council of the Union, a matter that it has refused to rectify till date.

“Finally, NUATE wishes to state that the high-handedness, plain wickedness and undiluted arrogance of Mr Lokman Balkan, the General Manager of Turkish Airlines in Lagos makes him unfit to hold such an important position as to manage people.

He has demonstrated total disdain for Nigerians and Nigerian laws, even aviation laws. There is no hiding the fact that Lokman is averse to ethical behaviour, and constitutes a present and definite danger to airline business in Nigeria. In order climes, Lokman would have been arrested and deported by now at the very least.

“At the appropriate time, he will also answer to the defamation of the character of the hapless staff.

“In conclusion, NUATE wishes to, on the one hand, assure Mr. Lokman Balkan, GM of Turkish Airlines in Lagos that his mission to exterminate the Union from the Airline will meet with utter failure. If anything, it will be he, not the hard-working Nigerian staff, who will leave the Airline.

“On the other hand, NUATE assures the public and aviation stakeholders that our justified position will be pursued in the manner that other aviation businesses will not be negatively impacted, but only to the extent that we are allowed to prosecute our struggle

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Turkish Airlines, union spat festers, NUATE wants GM exit from Nigeria

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