On November 2, the former staff of the “Armenian Airlines” organized a strike near the government building. They have been gathering near the governmental building every Thursday for the past three months and demanding their salaries for six months that had to be paid back in 2003 (186 million dram). According to pilot of “TU-154” airplane, Varoujan Vardanyan, they had to be given their salaries before December 31, 2003; however, they haven’t gotten their salaries so far. “They gave 167 thousand dram to 343 employees, but they haven’t given the 186 million that they had to give. We are demanding to pay the salaries and give the mentioned 186 million dram to the employees since they have received 200 million dram from selling the properties of the AAL”. This money is fully enough to pay the salaries; however, they need a governmental decision to pay that money. “Two weeks ago the head of the governmental personnel, Manouk Topuzayn met with us so that he could then inform the prime minister. That was all they have done so far, we don’t have any information since then” says V. Vardanyan. 90% of the AAL pilots are unemployed. Only 10-15 pilots were hired by “Armavia” company so far. However, the pilot says that they don’t want a job; the only thing they want is their salaries. If the government does not do anything, they will apply to the RA Constitutional Court. We asked the RA Civil Aviation Central Board for information concerning the mentioned issue and were informed that the mentioned company has a liquidation commission, which is in charge of those issues. The head of the AAL liquidation commission told us that he thought there was no need to demand the salaries due to the fact that the government couldn’t make such decisions, claiming that the liquidation process is done on the basis of the RA law on bankruptcy, and in order to be able to pay the salaries they had to make constitutional reforms in the law. “The problem of paying salaries to the pilots does not concern us. We can pay the money that we have received from selling the property of the AAL to them only if the government makes a decision to give its own money, i.e. the extra money received from selling the property of the alienated company”, said H. Ghambaryan.
