KUALA LUMPUR, May 26 — With reports claiming that up to 8,000 Malaysian Airlines (MAS) employees could lose their jobs tomorrow, an employee union for the airline today said they will seek Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s help should any of their terminated staff fail to be properly reimbursed.

In Malay daily Utusan Malaysia’s report today, the Malaysia Airlines System Employees Union (MASEU) said they will plead for Najib’s help if MAS does not reimburse its terminated employees according to their Collective Agreement.

“There is no other way. The administrator picked by Khazanah Nasional Berhad has full power to decide anything.

“The last step would be to appeal to the prime minister,” the union’s secretary-general Ab Malek Ariff was quoted as saying in the daily’s business section.

This is not the first time the union has called on Najib to intervene in the matters concerning the struggling airline.

Last year, the union urged the prime minister to look into MAS’s top leadership line-up.

MASEU executive secretary, Mohd Jabbarullah Abd Kadir claimed then that the existing top management did not have proper experience in the aviation industry, and therefore had failed to fulfil their responsibility of turning the struggling flag carrier profitable.

Local English daily The Star reported yesterday that over 8,000 MAS employees are at risk of termination tomorrow, with the remaining 12,000 employees subject to new contracts under a radical restructuring exercise.

Quoting unnamed sources, the newspaper said MAS will effectively terminate its entire workforce before offering two-thirds new contracts in a last ditch attempt to save the struggling airline that was struggling even before the MH17 and MH370 tragedies struck last year.

The only person spared from imminent termination is newly-appointed chief executive Christoph Mueller who is handling the government-linked company’s transition into a private entity, under sovereign fund Khazanah Nasional Berhad, called Malaysia Airlines Berhad.