Megawide Construction Corp. said Wednesday it plans to absorb the employees of Ninoy Aquino International Airport once it takes over the operations of the country’s main gateway.
“Following the guidelines of the government and the process we followed for MCIA, we will be sending offers of employment to the organic employees of NAIA,” Louie Ferrer, managing director for transport of Megawide, said.
“Those who accept the offers will enjoy benefits equal or possibly more than the benefits they were receiving from MIAA. Any employees who transfer to Megawide are also protected against redundancies, retrenchments or any labor-saving devices within a certain period,” he said.
Ferrer said Megawide would invest in creating a state-of-the-art aviation and airport training facility for NAIA which would prioritize not just organic employees of MIAA, but also non-organic and contractual employees of the airport complex.
“In the short term, our focus is to train the current employees of NAIA in line with our goal to deliver first-world services and operations within the first phase of operations; in the medium term, we aim to put up the aviation and airport training facility which will implement programs for professional development and institutionalize processes successfully implemented at MCIA,” Ferrer said.
“Our long-term goal is to develop Filipino aviation experts not just for Manila or Cebu, but also for other Philippine airports and airports around the world. We want to make the Philippines a competitive airport authority globally and we encourage other stakeholders in NAIA to work closely with us in retraining and upskilling their contractual and/or job order employees, to the level required to run a first-world airport,” he said.
The government has yet to award the contract to operate and rehabilitate NAIA to Megawide and partner GMR Infrastructure Ltd. of India, which secured the original proponent status on July 15.
Megawide earlier offered to develop NAIA for $3 billion with a contract period of 18 years on March 1, 2018. Its proposal was two weeks behind the proposal of NAIA Consortium which was submitted to the government on Feb. 12, 2018.
The Megawide proposal, however, did not include building a third runway. Even without it, Megawide estimated that it could increase the terminal capacity to 72 million against the competitor’s estimate of just 65 million.
It said the solutions would increase airfield capacity to 950 to 1,000 aircraft movements per day, representing 30-percent to 35-percent increase from the current 730 aircraft movements a day.