From 3.30 a.m. onwards, numerous employees in the aviation security area, in passenger control and in personnel and goods control stopped working at the capital’s BER airport, as Verdi union secretary Enrico Rümker confirmed to the German Press Agency. Shortly after the warning strike was announced, the airport announced that no passenger flights would take off on Monday.
It will therefore not only remain unusually quiet in the large hall of Terminal 1. Some planned landings are also cancelled. Almost all of the approximately 240 originally planned departures were already canceled on the airport’s website on Sunday. Some of the approximately 240 planned arrivals of aircraft, such as Ryanair, KLM and Air France, were also said to be “cancelled”.
According to the airport, the respective airline decides whether planes will arrive. Passengers should check with the airlines. The airport assumes that some of the landings will be canceled because the planes can no longer take off with new passengers and continue flying after their arrival. Verdi has called on workers to stop working by midnight. The union wants to increase the pressure on employers with whom it is negotiating bonuses for inconvenient working hours, such as weekends, and rules on overtime pay.
Due to a Verdi warning strike announced at short notice, there were also flight cancellations in Hamburg. Hamburg Airport announced early in the morning that 31 of 160 departures had already been cancelled. The employees of the handling service provider Aviation Handling Services Hamburg GmbH AHS, who are responsible for check-in and boarding, among other things, have been called to the warning strike. The airport said there could be further cancellations and significant delays. Arrivals are expected to go as planned.
The Working Group of German Airports criticized the warning strikes at the service providers. “Again, the airports are the most affected, although they are not involved in the negotiations and are not a party to collective bargaining.” Because unions and companies cannot reach an agreement, tens of thousands of passengers could not be checked and hundreds of flights were cancelled.
The action at the capital’s airport joins a long list of strikes, especially in traffic, in recent weeks. Most recently, airports were on strike on Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and the railway and transport union also paralyzed rail traffic nationwide for hours on Friday.
BER itself is on strike for the third time this year, and on other days passengers at BER were indirectly affected by work stoppages at other airports. During the strike in mid-March, as is the case now, all passenger flights were cancelled, and during the warning strike at the end of January no plane was able to land at BER.
“We once again urge the BDLS (Federal Association of Aviation Security Companies) to submit a negotiable offer on April 27th and 28th and not to play for time, otherwise there is a risk of further strikes in air traffic in May and at Pentecost,” said Wolfgang Pieper from the Verdi union on Saturday on the ongoing wage dispute.
BERLIN (dpa-AFX)
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Image sources: Rob Wilson / Shutterstock.com, Air France