Saudi flyadeal confirms order for 10 Airbus A330neo jets
Saudi budget carrier flyadeal on Wednesday confirmed a deal to order 10 Airbus A330neo wide-body passenger jets as it expands into fast-growing long-haul markets in Southeast Asia.
The sister airline of state-owned national carrier Saudia said it had also acquired purchase rights for a further 10 of the Rolls-Royce-powered planes, also known as A330-900.
The announcement at a ceremony in Toulouse confirms details reported by Reuters in January. The deal - which had previously been listed by Airbus as an unidentified buyer - is worth $1.2 billion after typical discounts, according to estimated delivery price data from UK-based consultancy Cirium Ascend.
Saudi Arabia's aviation sector is expanding as the kingdom invests billions of dollars in its Vision 2030 plan to diversify its economy away from fossil fuels and boost its private sector.
Flyadeal has not yet finalised routes for the jets but plans to target the busy Southeast Asia market - the latest low-cost airline to seek to break into long-haul flying, which has been a tricky bet for some budget carriers due to complexity and cost.
Saudi Arabia's FlyAdeal launches operations
'I can pretty well guarantee that it's going to be Southeast Asia - Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia or the Philippines,' flyadeal CEO Steven Greenway told Reuters of the planned route expansion.
The airline will also be able to carry more passengers into congested regional markets like Dubai.
Greenway, a former senior executive at Singapore Airlines subsidiary Scoot, has said flyadeal aims for 100 jets by 2030.
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Labour rights experts say that these stories lay bare the urgent need for enforceable contracts, the abolition of exploitative hiring practices and initiatives to educate workers about their rights – vital measures to combat forced labour in India's unorganised and semi-organised sectors. On March 24, India's federal Labour Minister Shobha Karandlaje told parliament that approximately 307 million unorganised workers, including migrant workers, were registered under an Indian government scheme. But researchers say that the true scale of India's unorganised workforce is likely even larger. 'Concealed' forced labour Benoy Peter, executive director of the Centre for Migration and Inclusive Development (CMID), a civil society organisation based in the southern Indian state of Kerala, cited a document from India's National Sample Survey Organization, which said that the country's total workforce is approximately 470 million in strength. Of this, about 80 million workers are in the organised sector, while the remaining 390 million – more than the entire population of the United States – are in the unorganised sector. The UN International Labour Organization's India Employment Report 2024 supports Benoy's observation, stating that low-quality jobs in the informal sector and informal employment are the dominant forms of work in India. The ILO report said that 90 percent of India's workforce is 'informally employed'. And many of these workers are victims of forced or bonded labour. India ratified the ILO's Forced Labour Convention 29 in 1954 and abolished bonded labour in 1975. Yet, according to the Walk Free Foundation, India has the highest estimated number of people living in modern slavery worldwide, with 11.05 million individuals (eight in every 1,000) affected. The real numbers, again, are likely worse. In 2016, the then Indian Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya informed Parliament that the country had an estimated 18.4 million bonded labourers, and that the government was working to release and rehabilitate them by 2030. But in December 2021, when Indian parliamentarian Mohammad Jawed inquired about this target in parliament, the government stated that only approximately 12,000 bonded labourers had been rescued and rehabilitated between 2016 and 2021. The textile sector is among the worst offenders. According to a parliamentary document from March this year, the southern Tamil Nadu state led textile and apparel exports, including handicrafts, with a value of $7.1bn. Gujarat, Modi's home state, followed in second place, exporting $5.7bn worth of these goods. Thivya Rakini, president of the Tamil Nadu Textile and Common Labour Union (TTCU), says that in a decade of visiting factories to work with garment workers, she has, in almost all instances, seen at least one – and often multiple – indicators of forced labour as defined by the ILO. Those indicators include intimidation, excessive overtime, withheld wages, sexual harassment, and physical violence, such as slapping or beating workers for failing to meet production targets. India's textiles industry has around 45 million workers, including 3.5 million handloom workers across the country. 'Forced labour in the textile industry is widespread and often concealed,' Thivya says. 'It's not a random occurrence. It stems directly from the business model of fashion brands. When brands pay suppliers low prices, demand large volumes on tight deadlines, and fail to ensure freedom of association or basic grievance mechanisms for workers, they create an environment ripe for forced labour.' Women make up 60-80 percent of the garment workforce, she says. 'Many lack formal contracts, earn less than men for the same work, and face frequent violence and harassment,' she said. Many are from marginalised groups – Dalits, migrants or single mothers – making them even more vulnerable in a patriarchal society. Other sectors are plagued by forced labour too. Transparentem, an independent, nonprofit organisation focused on uncovering and addressing human rights and environmental abuses in global supply chains, investigated 90 cotton farms in the central state of Madhya Pradesh from June 2022 to March 2023 and released its final report in January 2025, uncovering child labour, forced labour and unsafe conditions - children were handling pesticides without protection. 'No choice but to tolerate' Between 2019 and 2020, the Indian government consolidated 29 federal labour laws into four comprehensive codes. The stated aim of these reforms was to improve the ease of doing business while ensuring worker welfare. As part of this effort, the total number of compliance provisions was significantly reduced – from more than 1,200 to 479. However, while many states have drafted rules needed to implement these codes, there has still not been a nationwide rollout of these laws. Supporters of the new labour codes argue that they modernise outdated laws and provide greater legal clarity. Critics, however, particularly trade unions, warn that the reforms favour employers and dilute worker protections. One of the codes, for instance, makes it harder to register a workers union. A union must now have a minimum of 10 percent of the workers or 100 workers, whichever is less, in an establishment to be members of a union, a significant rise from the earlier requirement of just seven workers under the Trade Unions Act, 1926. Santosh Poonia from India Labour Line – a helpline initiative that supports workers, especially in the unorganised sector, by offering legal aid, mediation and counselling services – tells Al Jazeera that if workers are barred from forming unions, that would weaken their collective bargaining rights. 'Without these rights, they will have no choice but to tolerate exploitative working conditions,' he says. To Sanjay Ghose, a senior labour law lawyer practising at the Indian Supreme Court, the problem runs deeper than the new consolidated codes. 'The real issue is the failure to implement these laws effectively, which leaves workers vulnerable,' he says. Ghose warns that India's stagnating job creation could compound the exploitation and forced labour among workers. India's top engineering schools, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), have long prided themselves on how the world's biggest banks, tech giants and other multinationals queue up at their gates each year to lure their graduates with massive pay packages. Yet, the percentage of graduates from the IITs who secure jobs as they leave school has dropped sharply, by 10 percentage points, since 2021, when the Indian economy took a major hit from COVID-19 – a hit it hasn't fully recovered from. 'Even graduates with high ranks from premier institutions like the IITs are struggling to secure job placements,' Ghose says. 'With limited options available, job seekers are forced to accept whatever work they can find. This leads to exploitation, unfair working conditions, and, in some cases, forced labour.' Pramod Kumar, a former United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) senior adviser, adds that weakened private investment and foreign direct investment (FDI) have made national growth largely dependent on government spending. Consequently, job opportunities are primarily limited to the informal sector, where unfair working conditions are prevalent, leading to exploitation and forced labour. Private sector investment in India dropped to a three-year low of 11.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in fiscal year 2024, down from the pre-COVID average of 11.8 percent (fiscal years 2016-2020), according to ratings firm India Ratings & Research. Additionally, FDI in India declined by 5.6 percent year-on-year to $10.9bn in the October-December quarter of the last fiscal year, driven by global economic uncertainties. Against that economic backdrop, Poonia, from the India Labour Line, says he can't see how the government plans to meet its ambitious target of rescuing 18 million bonded labourers in India. He said he expects the opposite. 'The situation is going to worsen when the ease of doing business is prioritised over human rights and workers' rights.'
