Tomorrow, Air France and its customers face the 7th day of a strike action over the past 6 weeks.
Although constituting minority actions on a company-wide scale, these strikes are nonetheless causing severe commercial and operational impact and destroying the company’s image and results. They are putting great strains on the teams at work, who are dealing with dissatisfied and disappointed customers and stirring up internal tensions.
From the outset of the strikes, Air France management has explained its reasoning behind the significant pay and profit-sharing measures applied in 2018 and has underlined the risks the company would run if it were to increase its costs massively and abruptly, in a context of increased competition. It can only deplore that the negotiation proposals put forward have been rejected to date.
In a spirit of dialogue and responsibility, Air France management today invites the unions to participate in a multi-year pay negotiation (2019-2021). This negotiation, which will take place on an inter-category basis in line with union demands, will lead to a genuine “growth pact”. The multi-year scope will allow us to offer a response to the demands expressed and adopt a timeframe for implementing measures that the company is unable to apply abruptly.
In order to resolve this conflict, as part of this negotiation, management will offer to apply some of the forthcoming measures as from 1st April 2018 by increasing pay scales by 1%, resulting in a 2% pay scale increase for 2018.
This negotiation will begin on Thursday 12 April, and we propose that it takes place without interruption until an agreement open to signature is reached. With this proposal, management calls on unions to suspend the conflict while this negotiation takes place.
Moreover, the negotiation underway with the pilot unions over the past two weeks will continue around specific pilot themes, within a balanced framework allowing to guarantee the growth dynamic to which we are committed.
