The dramatic shortage of staff is being blamed, by all accounts, the chaotic situation at several airports in Britain and continental Europe in recent weeks. Flights are being cancelled by the hundreds, police officers are taking it upon themselves to announce that journeys and holidays are being cancelled, thousands of passengers are being forced to wait for hours before ending up, usually outraged, demanding rescheduling of their journey as soon as possible and/or compensation for their ordeal.
For example, in one day alone, on Tuesday 7 June, British Airways cancelled 120 flights to and from London Heathrow Airport and easyJet cancelled another 60. All these were in addition to some 300 flights which were cancelled over the weekend and while passengers were already at the airport, standing for hours in queues for the usual check-in. Similar phenomena have been observed in the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Italy as a result of strikes called by workers in the sector, who are also indignant.
Airlines and airport service providers in general are in despair: on the one hand, they are unable to cope with a massive surge in travel, while global tourism is recovering with a sharp upturn following the general lifting of the COVID-19 restrictions. On the other hand, however, during the health crisis, companies involved in the civil aviation sector have made large-scale cutbacks in order to survive, resorting to mass layoffs, which they are now desperately seeking and recruiting back, stating their willingness to recruit in large numbers. In Britain in particular, workers are threatening to bring the country's airports to a standstill if their demand for their pay to be restored to its pre-pension level, with the abolition of the 10 % pay cut imposed across the board at the start of the crisis, is not met.
As far as Greek airports and Aegean are concerned, which has implemented a much more modest policy of staff cuts than most foreign airlines, the problem has not yet manifested itself on a worrying scale. However, the general prognosis for the immediate future, as expressed by experts in the air transport sector, is extremely bleak.
It is estimated that airlines and airports will not have had time to integrate as many employees as they need and will remain unable to manage effectively the tourist flows, which have not even reached their peak. More simply, if there was a suffocation at British and central European airports at the end of May and the beginning of June, no one dares to imagine the situation that will prevail during the high season in August. As a result, the travel chaos, as predicted by Moody's, will not be restored before the summer of 2023.
As for the actual size of the reduction in staff in the aviation sector, according to Oxford Economics, 2.3 million workers have been cut worldwide, through voluntary redundancy schemes, non-renewal of fixed-term contracts or direct redundancies. Significantly, 1.7 million of the jobs lost were in land services.
The figures are awe-inspiring and effectively reflect the crippling of an entire industry, while offering a first explanation for its current inability to respond to a prime opportunity to make up for the losses recorded over the past two years. Instead of regaining lost ground, air transport presents a tragic picture. The international media are reproducing unprecedented images of total disorganisation, with pilots and flight attendants abandoning their seats in a hurry to help unload luggage, belts overflowing with untidy piles of suitcases spinning in the air while scrambling workers struggle to maintain basic order, etc.etc.
In Ireland, even the possibility of an emergency and urgent intervention by the army was considered in order to facilitate somewhat the flow of passengers at Dublin airport. Some 1,000 passengers were stranded on the ground and missed their flight due to the appalling delay in getting to the exit gate, with one of the biggest problems being at the security screening stage before boarding the aircraft. Understaffing in this area results in endless queues of thousands of people and, of course, very long delays.
On social media, affected passengers share their painful adventures, warning others to arrive at the airport 4 and 5 hours before the scheduled departure time in order to increase their chances of catching their flight. Again, however, no one can guarantee that they will make it through security on time, or even that the flight will not be cancelled at the last minute. The sight of passengers in a state of mental collapse crying in groups about the nightmare they are living instead of the dream of a much-needed holiday and freedom from the shackles of the pandemic is no longer rare at European airports.
The figures show that the critical part of the overall problem relates to ground staff and necessarily to the multinational companies operating in this sector. One of these is Swissport, with a presence at 285 airports around the world and a workforce that, before COVID, numbered 65 000 people. The sweeping wave of cutbacks has reduced its workforce by 20 000 employees. Its current advertisement for direct recruitment (in Europe and the United States) is for 30 000 jobs, but these are not expected to be filled quickly or easily, even if this may sound counterintuitive in the context of the labour market in the post-pension period. It would make sense that there would be an oversupply of willing hands, but as IATA's top executive Nick Carin explained to the Financial Times, 'the current shortages in our industry are a symptom of a deeper and long-standing pathogen, as we have not been able to build up a stable pool of employees with sufficient skills, particularly in the ground handling segment'.
The fundamental problem is the nature of the work required, the majority of which is manual and often takes place in bad weather conditions, and it goes without saying that the uninterrupted operation of airports entails shifts during 'anti-social' hours, holidays, public holidays, etc.Given that 75% of the operating costs for companies in the sector, such as Swissport and, in our case, Goldair Handling, are accounted for by salaries, the first victims, the ones who always suffer the negative consequences of the crisis, are inevitably the workers. At the same time, the constant effort to reduce operating costs makes it extremely difficult to raise wages. This is also why there are not thousands of people rushing to express interest in joining the ground staff, treating this option as a last resort rather than a long-term prospect.
In the case of the UK in particular, Brexit is an additional obstacle to attracting workers and filling vacancies in the ground services. The procedures for granting work permits in Britain to economic migrants have now become a complicated and time-consuming affair. It is therefore no coincidence that airline representatives are trying to put pressure on the competent authorities of the British state to relax the strict conditions for the admission of foreign workers to the United Kingdom.
Pilots
Inevitably, the travel chaos also affects aircraft pilots, who are in demand and therefore entitled to claim higher pay. However, their situation is quite peculiar, since their immediate recruitment has to do not only with the needs of the market but also with the specialisation of each pilot, his or her training and adaptation to a new type of aircraft, and so on.500 hours of flight time are required to obtain a civil aviation pilot's licence, while in Europe at least 800 hours of on-the-ground training and 200 hours of flight time are mandatory.
Therefore, the de facto recruitment of pilots can only be completed in a matter of months, if not a year or more, i.e. not before the second half of 2023. In the meantime, however, the turmoil in the aviation industry is being fuelled by unforeseen factors such as the war in Ukraine and the consequent increase in fuel, operating costs.
And while public demand is predicted to rise sharply as an instinctive reaction to the repression of previous years due to health risks, airlines will not only be flying between panic-stricken airports, but also cutting routes at will due to staff shortages. Thus, the case for leisure travel, the escape from the darkness and sadness of restrictions, the much-desired holiday outside their own country for millions of people is becoming an intractable equation, with many variables - but above all contradictory and unpredictable ones.
Source: First Theme
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