Workers across Europe have responded with industrial action and strike ballots to an onslaught on their jobs, wages and conditions by the airline industry.
Profit gouging by the aviation industry has led to a catastrophic situation of queues, delays and flight cancellations at airports across the continent, with hundreds of thousands of passengers stranded and with many losing thousands of euros and pounds.
This week, ground crew and firefighters struck at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport and at several smaller airports in France. Italian air traffic controllers and workers at budget airlines have held four-hour stoppages. In the spring, airline workers struck in Poland and at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airportthird-busiest in Europe.
More strikes are being prepared, including at London’s main Heathrow Airport and at Scandinavian carrier SAS AB across Denmark, Norway and Sweden.
The European airline crisis afflicting millions is entirely due to the rush by the ruling elite to recklessly end public health measures under conditions in which, to shore up their profits and stock market valuations, they had already decimated the infrastructure of the industry during the pandemic.
Under conditions in which airline traffic is back to 95 percent of what it was pre-COVID, many airlines and airports cannot function since the vast majority of almost 200,000 European aviation staff made redundant over the past two years have not been replaced. This is just the tip of a global iceberg. The Financial Times reported this week, “According to research by consultancy Oxford Economics, compared with pre-Covid levels, there were 2.3mn fewer jobs in the aviation industry by September 2021. These figures include a 29 percent fall in contracted staff at airports, such as ground-handlers, where 1.7mn jobs were lost.”
The Euronews website cited Aéroport de Paris Chief executive Augustin de Romanet who “estimated…