“Armavia” owner ordered not to pay the salaries of the employees who had applied to court with a claim to receive the bonuses
“Armavia” Air Company’ owner Mikhail Baghdasarov does not like that his former employees make a demand against him, to the point, the demand is legal: the former flight stewards demand their bonuses for 3 years of work.
In the conversation with “Aravot”, a group of employees of “Armavia” told that Baghdasarov was so angry on his former employees that he ordered not to pay the salaries of about 20 flight stewards, just for the reason that they have appealed to the court to get their per diems from “Armavia”.
“Baghdasarov was in such a fury that he had instructed the management not to pay the wages thereof. When this news reached us, we could not believe, we went to the office to clarify, one of the directors said that there is an order from above, it is not our fault. Now, the rest of us are paid the salaries for March- April, and we went to get ours, they did not give it to us”, – assured a group of former employees of “Armavia” to “Aravot”. According to them, they first did not have the intention to apply to the court, but the persuasion to receive their per diems through the court came from the State Labor Inspectorate and the RA President’s office, and they have thought that if such an admonition is made by 2 state systems, it might be the only way out to get what they earned. “We were told from the Inspectorate that it would be difficult for them to prove the bonuses, it would be better to apply to the court. We were also told from the President’s office that we should resolve these issue by the court, so, we have applied, but “Armavia” does not care for us, the representative of “Armavia” did not appear before the court. But the State Labor Inspectorate does not respond to our request, we wrote three letters to the President of Armenia to give instruction to the Inspectorate to give a proceeding to our application, after the 3rd letter to the President the Inspectorate began to get involved with our case,”- said the former employees of the airline. To the point, in our conversation the flight stewards did not want to introduce themselves, claiming that Michael Baghdasarov would get more furious. “He has a habit of revenging. To one of our guts, as punishment, he ordered not to pay salary, or at least pay the last. When this gut was interested why, Baghdasarov had told ‘you show up by media quite a lot.”
Read also
The per diems requested by the former employees applied to the court is about 500 thousand drams, which Mr. Baghdasarov want to “wash off”. According to flight stewards, “Those 500 thousand drams are of no value as of today, because 1-2 years ago this amount cost at least something, but now we are in need for it, because we do not have a job, we live in debts.”
While the Court would decide the issue of paying per diems to the formers flight stewards of “Armavia”, the calculation and payment of workers’ salaries has remained unsettled. The matter is that the State Labor Inspectorate, which should deal with defining the salary scales, has been dissolved by the government decree, and it merged to the sanitary anti-epidemic inspection. And now, as far as the merging process of these two inspections is not completed, we were unable to establish a contact with the Inspectorate to find out at what phase is the issue of salary payment to flight stewards. And, as the former “Armavia” employees assured, they had applied to the Inspectorate to regulate the size of the amount of wages for their work for recent months. According to the flight stewards, “Armavia” has terminated its
flights, and was not exempting us from work, we were idle for a month and a half, we did not get the order to be released, in the conversation with the lawyer of the Inspectorate we found out that pursuant to the law, the salary for the months of idleness is estimated according to the range of the average salary, whereas “Armavia” had estimated by the the rate of the salary, which is 40 thousand drams, and our average salary is about 400 thousand drams and one and a half month will be about 600 thousand drams. Now, there is no Inspectorate, there is no one to get involved in our case. It leaves the impression that the Inspectorate is shut down because of us. Everything is expected to be in this country, the government prefers to protect oligarchs rather than ordinary employees.”
The former employees of “Armavia” have decided to organize a protest near the U.S. Embassy, so, as they say, to inform the international community about how the workers’ rights in Armenia are violated. “So, what else can we do, we turn to the government, they says that we do not have leverage to influence, and if you do not have leverage, write down a resignation letter and leave your office.”
The former employees of “Armavia”, even though they do not have high hopes that there will be an entity in Armenia that can make a decision against the businessman Mikhail Baghdasarov, however, to protect their rights they are going to apply for all possible instances. “We are going to write a letter to the Ombudsman if this instance also “washes off” our case, then we’ll hold demonstrations every day.”
Nelly BABAYAN
