Court orders TAP to pay €50M to pilots

Portugal’s supreme court has ordered the country’s national airline TAP to shell out €50 million in compensation to its pilots.

The court said that it agreed with the pilots union SPAC over errors in calculating salaries and holiday pay which affected around 1,000 pilots.
The court’s decision harks back to a writ placed with the courts in 2017 by the Civil Aviation Pilots’ Union (SPAC) reports the weekend newspaper Expresso.
SPAC had accused TAP, which is undergoing a profound top-to-bottom restructuring to make it economically viable, of having applied a wages and holiday pay calculation formula for pilots that was incorrect and that shortchanged the pilots by millions of euros.
The union alerted the airline but its warnings fell of deaf ears and the situation dragged on from 2010 with TAP believing that the issue would not end up in court.
TAP has to cough up €50 million for 12 years of errors in calculation that now means it has to make corrections in tax and social security deductions, as well as bonuses and holiday pay.
TAP has been notified of the decision and has met with the union to examine how the refunds will be made. No agreement on overall grievances between the airline’s pilots and the company has been reached.