A strike by cabin crew staff at Air France came to an end on Tuesday, August 2nd, after a week-long strike that was a graphic reminder of the difficult industrial relations confronting France's flagship carrier. It also underlined the enormity of the task facing the new chief executive officer of Air France-KLM, Jean-Marc Janaillac, who took up the reins of the company just a few weeks before the industrial action began.
The strike certainly had an impact. On Monday alone more than 150 flights were cancelled at the Paris airports of Roissy-Charles de Gaulle and Orly as a result of the industrial action, which was launched on July 27th by two of the three unions that represent cabin crew at the airline, SNPNC-FO and Unsa-PNC. The two unions represent about 45% of the staff. The SNPNC-FO union estimates that at its peak in the early days of the action some 70% of staff took part in the strike, falling to around 50% over the weekend. The union says between 210,000 and 280,000 passengers were affected by the action, which came during a peak period for holiday departures and returns. The total cost of the stoppage to the airline is put at around 90 million euros, compared with the 400-million-euro cost of a 14-day strike by pilots in the autumn of 2014.
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At the heart of the current dispute is the anxiety of Air France's 13,600 cabin crew staff over their collective agreement on working conditions. The current accord is due to expire on October 31st. Following tense negotiations, in which management tried to change some rules in the face of union opposition, the airline finally agreed to prolong the existing agreement, with a few minor changes, but only for an additional 17 months, to March 2018.
This proved unacceptable for the unions, who point out that the two previous agreements had been for five years (in 2008) then for three-and-a-half years. They fear that Air France is simply looking to buy time and to postpone some difficult decisions until after the French presidential election in May 2017. The unions have asked for the agreement to last for five years but would be ready to accept a three-year period. Since the end of the strike management has now offered to extend the current agreement until February 2017, pending further talks.
“We would point out that cabin crew are the only category of personnel at Air France whose company agreements are negotiated for a fixed period,” Christelle Auster, deputy secretary general of the SNPNC-FO union, told Mediapart. “For ground staff and pilots conditions are fixed by a once and for all agreement. Cabin crew have become the only expendable resource at Air France,” says the trade unionist. Christelle Auster says that after various cost-cutting plans at the company 2,000 cabin crew jobs have been shed over three years, and she criticises a company at which she says there is a “constant social cost”. A fourth round of voluntary redundancies has just been announced by management.
In this context cabin crew want to be able to maintain long-term guarantees over their working conditions, which they describe as “very tiring, unsociable, where you have to work at night, put up with time differences and find child care solutions, which is very expensive”, says Christelle Auster. The staff have also rejected plans to reduce the number of cabin crew on certain medium-haul flights.
The strength of feeling among cabin crew is shown by the fact that the airline has never before suffered a week-long strike of this kind in peak holiday season. And yet during the tense stoppage itself, management did not make contact with the unions involved. “Unfortunately that's a reflection of how negotiations go at our place,” says the SNPNC-FO's Christelle Auster. In fact, discussions between the two sides had foundered five days before the strike began and both sides refused to budge from their position.
Last Saturday the airline's director of human resources Gilles Gateau said on France Info radio that the strike should not have taken place “particularly at this period”. A few days earlier Frédéric Gagey, the boss of the Air France section of Air France-KLM, had told Le Parisien newspaper that there was absolutely no reason to “suspect us of wanting to stab our employees in the back”. He also warned: “You don't go on strike in such a period, with the risk of compromising Air France's recovery.” But it was on Monday, August 1st, that the airline's deputy director general Pierre-Olivier Bandet, really gave the unions something to think about when he hinted to Les Echos business daily that he wanted to reduce some of the benefits accorded to cabin crews. “At stake is the health of French air travel and thus the jobs of French cabin crew,” he said. “Passengers want prices to come down. We can't go in a different direction in relation to other companies who have made great efforts at competitiveness.”
Other airline staff broadly supportive of cabin crew strike
During their power struggle with management, the cabin crew have mostly been able to count on the support of fellow employees. It is true that a third union, the UNAC, which represents around 22% of cabin crew at the company, decided in early July to postpone its notice to strike until mid-October. But the strikers did get the support of the three main pilots' unions at Air France, the SNPL, SPAF and Alter.
As for ground staff, they also seem to understand the recourse to industrial action. Marc Saladin, secretary general of UNSA which represents ground staff, said: “Of course staff at Air France have also had to suffer the strike this summer, as they were unable to benefit that week from the commercial benefits that they normally have the right to, to go on holiday. That's tough, it's true. But the movement is well understood by the 'ground' staff. The image of this strike is very different from the previous movements by pilots, which staff supported a lot less.” In fact, pilots are seen by other airline employees as a separate category, who negotiate by mutual agreement with the management and who are the only group not to have made the efforts demanded by management over the last three years to reduce costs.
The strike which ended on Tuesday was the first faced by the new chief executive officer of the Air France-KLM group, Jean-Marc Janaillac, who recently took over after the resignation of Alexandre de Juniac, who is the new director general and CEO at the International Air Transport Association (IATA). During his tenure de Juniac oversaw the loss of 10,000 jobs while his own pay went up by 65%. Janaillac previously occupied a senior post at Paris public transport operator RATP and more recently oversaw a degree of recovery at the group Transdev, one of the largest public transport operators in Europe. He is a friend of French president François Hollande and the president's chief of staff Jean-Pierre Jouyet, and is generally seen as a man who favours dialogue. One of his first tasks will indeed be to tackle the poor industrial relations at the company, a situation highlighted by the disastrous episode of a senior executive getting his shirt ripped off by disgruntled employees.
Even before taking up his post, Janaillac managed in mid-June to negotiate a four-month truce with pilots, in which they agreed not to start any industrial action before November 1st, giving the new boss time to set out his plans for the airline. “We've nothing against him and we didn't reserve this as an initiation ceremony for him,” insists Christelle Auster, referring to the timing of the strike. “He simply doesn't have influence on the talks concerning our business [editor's note, the Air France section of Air-France-KLM], which doesn't directly concern him.”
However, the unions are less charitable about Gilles Gateau, the director of human resources who started last November and who was parachuted in directly from the office of prime minister Manuel Valls. “When he was at the prime minister's office he was involved in commissioning the [September 2015] Combrexelle report on labour law reform,” says the SNPNC-FO's Christelle Auster. “Yet this report explains that company agreements should be signed for a length of four or five years. Why doesn't he apply these recommendations?”
The advance notice for the recent strike had envisaged a week-long stoppage and the unions chose not to extend it, meaning that in the short term at least the situation will calm down. The SNPNC said it was meeting later this week to discuss the situation, while management is now raising the prospect of fresh talks. “We haven't had discussions during the entire dispute but today we have received a letter from management which envisages the restart of discussions at the end of August,” Christelle Auster said on Tuesday. Jean-Marc Janaillac has said that he wants to infuse the company with a “new spirit” based on “listening and dialogue”. It could be that this suggestion of new talks is the first inkling that his words may be translated into actions.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter