The strike by Air France pilots has been going on for a week now. After 10 years in the red, the French national airline emerges from the deficit for the first time, but has to deal with the modernization of the company structure, which is no longer in step with the challenges posed by low-cost airlines. However, the pilots are not about to give up a status quo which has so far guaranteed them lavish hotel transfers and irrevocable prerogatives. So for a week they have chosen the path of strike causing losses of 100 million to Air France. The strike, according to the Snpl union which is in charge of the protest operation, will go on until Friday. Each additional day with the planes stopped implies a loss of 15 million euros.
The claims of the union and pilots are all aimed at the plan to redefine Air France's corporate policy, which aims not to return the planes only to Paris or Amsterdam, keeping them almost always in the air, to a radical reduction in hotel expenses crew and work contracts stipulated according to local market standards. The translation is that, at least in theory, there will be recruitments of Portuguese pilots from the company's base in the Iberian country.
“Today Alexandre De Juniac, president of Air France, wants to invest one billion euros in the creation of an entity based in Portugal whose objectives are relocation, social dumping and the avoidance of taxes and social burdens which weigh heavily on France ”. These are the reasons for the protest of the French aviators, clearly explained by Guillaume Schmid, the spokesman for the pilots of the Snpl union to France Info. While De Juniac replies - ironically - that "if you could make a low cost airline with the operating rules of a traditional company, I think by now we would have known”.
The two fronts, that of the pilots and that of company management, face each other on an issue that goes beyond the modernization or otherwise of a company. In fact, on the one hand there is certainly the resistance of the staff to give up prerogatives and guarantees established over years of work, denouncing an ever guilty reluctance to progress and change. On the other hand, however, there is a company policy - it has been repeated, in red for over 10 years - which pretended for too long that low cost airlines were a non-lasting reality, and which certainly would not have influenced the objectives in the slightest of the traditional national airlines, above all Air France.
