Royal Air Maroc Crisis: Crucial Meeting to Decide Airline’s Fate Amid Bankruptcy Fears

The future of Royal Air Maroc (RAM) will be decided this Thursday, July 2 at the meeting of the works council convened by the management for 2 p.m., informs Le360. The debates should mainly focus on the company’s crisis exit plan, which is on the verge of bankruptcy.

Specifically, the committee could rule on a structural transformation, a social assessment, a production strategy, etc. or make the decision to lay off all or part of the employees, for technological, structural or economic reasons.

The most representative union of RAM personnel, affiliated to the Moroccan Union of Labor (UMT), will participate in this session, to which the Moroccan Association of Airline Pilots (AMPL) is also invited. But from concordant sources, the latter would have declined the invitation, arguing that a works council is not an appropriate framework for dealing with "the social relations of the pilots’ union", specifies the same source.

Among the staff, the surprise is total, especially since the management has not convened the works council for a long time, in violation of Article 467 of the Labor Code which provides for a meeting every six months.

According to a report by the International Air Transport Association (IATA), cited by the Minister of Tourism and Air Transport, Nadia Fettah, during her appearance in parliament on Monday, June 8, a drop in air traffic of around 5 million passengers is expected in Morocco, with financial losses and job cuts as a consequence.