The Directorate General for Civil Aviation (DGAC) has asked airlines to reduce their number of flights between 7 a.m. and 2 p.m. Thursday, as several European airports have recently faced huge difficulties in managing travelers due to a lack of staff.
Air France, the main company operating at the Paris-Charles-de-Gaulle hub, announced that it had canceled 85 short and medium-haul flights on Thursday to meet DGAC requirements.
“Schedule changes on long-haul flights” are also planned, added the company, specifying that “the customers concerned will be contacted directly”.
All the unions at Roissy airport (CGT, FO, CFDT, CFTC, CFE-CGC, Unsa and SUD) call on all employees of the platform to mobilize to demand a salary increase of 300 euros “unconditionally , for all”.
“Despite the resumption of traffic and the profits made, our work is not paid at its fair value,” the unions are indignant in a joint leaflet. “Everything increases, except our remuneration”, they denounce.
For FO, “the chaos suffered for several weeks by employees working on the many airport platforms in France and Europe is intolerable”. The union estimates that 15,000 the number of jobs lost in two years in the aviation sector due to the Covid-19 pandemic, which results in “pressurized employees”.
At the end of April, the president of ADP had announced that 4,000 positions were to be filled on the airport platforms of Orly and Roissy, faced with major recruitment problems.
After two lean years linked to the pandemic, air traffic is restarting at full speed in Europe and is gradually returning to its 2019 levels.
At some European airports, the lack of staff has already led to huge chaos, such as at Amsterdam-Schiphol or Frankfurt, where flights have had to be canceled in recent weeks due to shortages of ground staff.
In the UK, hundreds of flights were canceled last week for the same reason.
