Air France management are planning to cut 2,900 jobs in the next two years. The rationale is to reduce costs to compete with low-cost companies. Several weeks of “negotiations” have proved fruitless because Air France management have set conditions which are impossible for the unions to accept. The company demands from their pilots that they work an extra 200 hours a year for the same salary; several routes will be closed; and 400 pilots will be made redundant. To defeat the well-organised pilot union is only the first part of the attack against workers’ rights. Then the hostesses and stewards will be asked to work more for the same pay and will get fewer resting days, and the cabin crews will be downsized.
Alexandre de Juniac, the Air France-KLM chief executive, has announced that the company would go ahead with the cuts and redundancies regardless of the outcome of the negotiations. De Juniac is even by Anglo-American business standards a patron voyou (rogue boss). In a jaw-dropping talk he gave in front of businesspeople in December 2014 , he condemned the 35-hour working week (a popular reform among salaried workers in France), questioned whether there should be a legal retirement age at all, and wondered whether the ban on underage workers should not be lifted. Worst of all, he found it amusing to share with the audience a conversation he had with his Qatar Airways counterpart. The latter confided to him that there could never be any strikes in Qatar as pilots would be sent to jail. This is a rather chilling story when one knows that cost reductions are implemented in order to compete with Gulf rivals. This report from the Guardian
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