Malaysia Airlines' slimmer incarnation has 4,000 staff on short-term contracts

This is a far cry from the old Malaysia Airlines (MAS) that had 20,000 employees mostly on permanent contracts. MAB took over the operations of the old airline on Tuesday.
The short-term contracts range from three to 12 months, implying that as many as 11,000 people will eventually be laid off as part of the remaking of MAS into MAB, instead of the 6,000 announced earlier.
“Nine thousand may just be the number that MAB needs permanently going forward, since it is a smaller airline than the former MAS,” an aviation executive said on Wednesday.
Besides those employed in MAB, 2,000 are employed in subsidiaries such as Firefly, MASkargo and MASwings.
Sovereign wealth fund Khazanah Nasional, in its quarterly update on MAB, said the airline had hired several senior people.
Those axed were compensated under a formula that had been worked out earlier and those who joined MAB also had a sign-on package as an inducement to join the new airline.
Khazanah said MAS disbursed 1.5 billion ringgit (Bt12.7 billion) as payments and benefits provided to staff joining MAB and those exiting MAS.
The investment agency said it would disburse about 1.3 billion ringgit soon as part of the 6 billion ringgit set aside for the remaking of the national carrier.
“In total, including the 1.3 billion ringgit, Khazanah would have disbursed a total of about 3.2 billion ringgit out of the 6 billion ringgit in conditional investment funding allocated to the restructuring effort, subject to strict conditions being met,” it said.
Besides staff, Khazanah said comprehensive efforts to reset the operating business were ongoing, including more than 100 projects aimed at resetting the operating business mode.
They include repairing revenue, optimising cost and putting in place enablers to facilitate the restructuring effort.
Khazanah said further fine-tuning of MAB’s business plan was ongoing. Several non-profitable routes have been suspended over the last three months, and further route rationalisation is under way.
MAS is said to have cut about 18 per cent of its capacity until last month.
“The airline is on track towards becoming a sustainably profitable, principally commercial national carrier that supports national development objectives, while remaining a full-service international airline that maintains its current domestic routes and a regional backbone with broad global connectivity through partnerships,” Khazanah said.