Crippled by the huge cuts during the pandemic, the aviation industry is currently struggling to keep up as the air traffic operations increase from one day to another.
Results? Strikes at airports and airlines with massive pressure on the understaffed cabin crew, ground staff, pilots, and other related airport staff who have to deal with a constantly increasing workload.
While airline profits are skyrocketing again, the aviation workers are mostly struggling for survival. It looks more and more like full recovery for profit, but exploitation of workers.
Thus, we should not be surprised when air companies are pushing workers even for more, just for a bigger profit!
And one of the bad guys in the sector is our ‘old friend’: Wizz Air CEO, Jozsef Varadi. This week, he directly asked the Hungarian low-cost airline’s workers to forget about ‘fatigue’ and go for the extra mile.
How do you dare, Jozsef Varadi, to ask for such a thing? What kind of authority do you think you have to force workers to endanger the lives of the passengers due to the fatigue they are exposed to?
The current staff shortages threatening to paralyse aviation did not happen overnight, signs are out there. In the last few months we had strikes in Belgium, Netherlands, Italy, and the threat of strikes in the UK.
Now, airlines should not be surprised that their employees are reacting, they are striking in airports to simply ask for decent jobs and fair wages for a decent life.
Moreover, since the beginning of the pandemic, we have warned that cuts during the COVID-19 crisis would have a huge impact on the industry in a post-COVID world. We kept on saying that the precarious work contracts in the sector and the exposure to health and safety issues, long working days, and shift work would have a massive impact on the industry.
One question remains: will the bill be put again on the account of the aviation employees?