An enormous chaos at and around Schiphol was the result of the strike of KLM baggage staff. About 150 employees stopped working during one of the busiest days of the year. Two of them are Walter and Gerben, they also went on strike and now explain why the working situation at KLM has become untenable.
The 52-year-old Walter van der Vlies, manager of the loading and unloading department, sees many of his colleagues drop out: “The work pressure is enormous and people are on their toes. It often happens that you don’t fly an airplane, as usual. load and unload with four or five people, but with two. Sometimes flights are canceled because there are not enough people.”
‘An untenable situation’
Colleague Gerben de Jong (36) agrees and states that the situation has become untenable. According to him, it started with the corona pandemic: “There was an enormous flexible layer of employees at the airport, but they were then sent away. But when everything started to pick up again, the number of employees lagged behind,” said De Jong.
The result: a gaping hole in KLM’s workforce. And according to Gerben, this shortage of forces has meant that the workload has been extremely high for months. “Breaks have been shortened and people have to work harder and faster.” According to Gerben, it sometimes goes so far that safety cannot be guaranteed: “Think of the maximum speed, 30 km/h on peripheral roads and 6 km/h on the parking spaces for aircraft. They drive faster there to save time”, says Gerben. him as an example.
Van der Vlies started working at the end of the eighties, according to him the situation is comparable to that of about thirty years ago: “There were a shortage of hands, but then dozens of people were hired in a short time,” he tells NH Nieuws. “At that time there was just no dissatisfaction with the level of wages,” he compares.
Is the solution not obvious?
Aviation reporter Doron Sajet of NH Nieuws explains that it is not so easy for KLM to raise wages and hire new staff. This has to do with a number of demands made by the government in exchange for support during the corona crisis.
“The government has actually said: ‘we will keep you going, but then you have to cut costs as much as possible,'” explains Sajet. Highly paid employees have therefore had to give up wages and other wages have been frozen. “KLM can’t just raise costs now,” he continues. “Because that is not according to the agreement. And everything must also be paid back.”
Gerben de Jong indicates that he is despondent by the situation and has no confidence in improvement from the management. According to the men, it was therefore high time to strike. Walter van der Vlies therefore didn’t hesitate for a second when, on his day off, he got wind of the ‘wild strike’ of his colleagues.
“You don’t want to take any action at all. You want everything to go well, but this is the very last resort”
“I immediately jumped in the car,” he says about that moment. Although Van der Vlies says he ‘doesn’t look back on it with pride’. “The same goes for everyone else,” he says. “You don’t want to take any action at all. You want everything to go well, but this is the very last resort. It’s a shame that KLM has let it get this far.”
The KLM management has indicated that it will enter into discussions with the dissatisfied employees in the near future. Van der Vlies does not rule out more strikes if those talks lead nowhere.
Chaos due to strike
The chaos is the result of a so-called ‘wild strike’ by about 150 KLM baggage workers. They stopped working outside the union to express their dissatisfaction with the outsourcing of their work to the company Viggo. In addition to the more than a hundred canceled flights, many were also delayed by the work stoppage.
Due to the many canceled flights, passengers in the terminal quickly piled up. This got so out of hand that some exits of the A4 were closed and travelers with flights until 3 p.m. were urged not to come to the airport. That request was withdrawn a few hours later.