Security guards, baggage handlers, cleaners and other employees at Schiphol are very concerned about the working conditions at the airport. The workload is still high, as is absenteeism due to illness, and safety at the airport is sometimes under discussion.
The FNV trade union wrote this in a letter to the management of Schiphol and the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management on Tuesday. According to the association, little has come of Schiphol’s intention to improve the quality of work at the airport.
In the letter of appeal, the association criticizes the public tendering of facility services: security, ground handling and cleaning. Schiphol has been providing this work for decades in multi-year packages. Cleaning has just been awarded, security has also been completed after a tough legal battle, and the new procedure for ground handling will soon start. According to the FNV, Schiphol still chooses the cheapest provider of those services, even though the airport promised a different course two years ago. This price war is at the expense of employees, the union believes.
According to the FNV, airlines are putting Schiphol under great pressure to keep the rates for facility services – included in the so-called airport charges – as low as possible. Air France-KLM has been complaining for some time that Schiphol is becoming the most expensive airport in Europe due to all the rate increases at Amsterdam airport.
Prize fighter
In 2023, Schiphol stated that the airport no longer wanted to be the ‘price fighter’ among European airports. When tendering for multi-million dollar contracts for security, ground handling and cleaning, among other things, the airport would no longer focus primarily on price, but much more on quality.
The number of security firms, ground handling companies and cleaning companies at the airport also had to be reduced. This was also the opinion of then Minister Mark Harbers (Infrastructure and Water Management, VVD), who introduced the necessary rules to limit the number of service companies at Schiphol. Their competitive battle – the “race to the bottom”, as the unions always call it – came to the surface in mid-2022. Due to a shortage of people, security at the time became chaotic: long lines for baggage control at the airport, many dissatisfied passengers.
FNV wrote in its urgent letter on Tuesday that Schiphol still prefers cheap providers. The association specifically mentions the just completed tender for security. In the budget, security costs – the amount that Schiphol wants to spend on checking passengers and baggage – have decreased, while the number of passengers and inflation are actually increasing. According to the FNV, this means a cutback.
In the tender, Schiphol has also set ‘efficiency targets’ of 177 million euros for security services. The airport would also require security guards to deploy more flexible workers instead of people with permanent employment to deal with peaks in crowds. For a higher quality of work, the unions always stated, reducing temporary work is important.
The three multi-year security contracts – for ten years, total value 6 billion euros – were won by security companies I-SEC, Securitas and Trigion. That didn’t happen without a fight. CSTN and G4S, who still work at Schiphol, ignored the contracts and filed summary proceedings. They lost that. According to the court, Schiphol had made no mistakes in the tender.
The court documents did show that CSTN and G4S, now the largest security firms at Schiphol, were too expensive or too inflexible. For FNV, all the more proof that the airport still selects based on price. Employees of the losing parties must transfer to the winning security firms as of March 2026. This switch should not be at the expense of their employment conditions, but FNV is not comfortable with this.
The tender for ground handling (luggage, passenger check-in, guidance at the gates, refueling services, catering) will start soon. The number of companies must also be reduced there to stop the race to the bottom. The FNV fears that this tender will also be at the expense of employees.
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