WESTERN BUREAU- The Supreme Court yesterday ordered air traffic controllers who have been off the job since Friday to go back to work.

After wage talks broke down between the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and the Jamaica Air Traffic Controllers Association (JATCA), the roughly 60 air traffic controllers took industrial action to press for a 20 – 40 per cent salary hike that would put their salaries on par with the wages paid to flight safety operators.

“If the government is willing to negotiate with us in regards to our contract, then we will return. If not, we will hold out until we can come to some meaningful agreement,” association president Howard Greaves told the Sunday Observer yesterday before the Labour Ministry and the Attorney General’s Department took the matter to court.

After the ruling became public, Greaves said he planned to have a late-night meeting with his members to discuss the issue and formulate a response. The initial feedback from his members, he said, was that they were ready to defy the court order.

The court has ruled that air traffic controllers are part of the essential services and, based on section 32 of the Labour Relations and Industrial Disputes Act, they are prohibited, within the next 30 days, from taking any form of industrial action.

Before the court ruling, the CAA had resisted the air traffic controllers’ prodding for a salary hike, saying that would be in breach of the Memorandum of Understanding signed last February between the Jamaica Confederation of Trade Unions and the government.

The MOU is a wage-freeze-for-jobs pact that limits salary increases within the public sector to three per cent, as the government tries to cut its wage bill by $6 billion by 2006. In exchange for the wage freeze, the government gave a commitment not to slash 15,000 jobs, keep inflation between eight and nine per cent in 2004/2005 and between six and seven per cent between 2005/2006.

But Greaves argued yesterday that JATCA is not a signatory to the MOU so its members should not be bound by its terms, an argument used by police officers who have still not managed to get the government to agree to their demands for a 45 per cent raise.

Pointing out that the CAA is a revenue-making entity, Greaves suggested that the authority could increase its navigational charges if it was having difficulty funding the association’s proposed wage package.

“We have told them for more than three years now that, if necessary, they could make adjustments to the navigation charges, to fund air traffic services, and they have not done that,” said Greaves.

The air traffic controllers last received a salary adjustment in 2003. At that time, the workers received increases ranging from five to 10 per cent.

And while Greaves said yesterday that the industrial action was expected to result in flight delays, manager of the Norman Manley International Airport in Kingston Paul Hall told the Sunday Observer that the airport’s services had not been disrupted.

“The industrial action had no impact at this point, but that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t escalate,” he explained, adding that flights were being marshaled by CAA senior management.

Meanwhile, Curtis Grad, the vice-president of operations for MBJ, the consortium that operates the Sangster International Airport in Montego Bay, said late yesterday that the strike was only expected to affect two flights.

“It was business as usual today. But because we expect to close at 9 o’clock tonight, two incoming flight are expected to be affected because the tower will be shut down,” Grad said.

The flights, he said, are Sky Service from Canada and Air Jamaica’s flight 006 from Manchester, England.