New strike calls for Paris airports in July

Workers’ unions at Paris airports have called for strikes this month after failing to reach an agreement over the management’s most recent proposals on salary levels, as disruption continues this weekend.

New strikes have been suggested for:

• July 8-10

• July 13-17

Workers at the ADP group, which runs the Paris airports, have said that their calls for salary increases have not been heard.

They refused the offer of a 4% pay rise that was offered in exchanged for lifting the strike notice from June 30 to July 3.

They are instead calling for a 6% pay rise overall, and more significant re-evaluations of the lowest salaries.

Emmanuel Duchemin-Humbert, representative of Force Ouvrière Aéroports de Paris, told BFMTV: “The question of wages has been raised since 9 June by an inter-union movement.

“Today, we are simply asking for a minimum of being able to catch up with inflation and we are far from this in the wage negotiations, which have been at a standstill since January.

“We don’t want passengers to have to pay for it. The problem is that salary negotiations are at a stalemate. More than a month and a half ago, they announced measures that never arrived.

“We expected to be able to make progress given the strike, but we have not even been received by the management. We don’t want to disrupt people’s holidays, but today some of our employees will not even get to go on holiday. Not because they are on strike, but because they do not earn enough money.”

It comes as dozens of flights have been cancelled at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle this weekend due to personnel strikes, at a time when airports are struggling to manage the spike in demand post-Covid amid staff shortages.

Charles de Gaulle airport also suffered major bag handling issues over the weekend, with thousands of passengers forced to go home without their suitcases on July 1 due to an IT bug.

Mr Duchemin-Humbert said: “About 50% of the people who arrived yesterday before 17:00 left without their luggage or with someone else's luggage, which is also against security rules.”

ADP said that the problems were caused by technical issues.

The first affected the "baggage sorting centre at the start of operations", and the second concerned "a computer system breakdown, which affected several airlines in the early morning", the company said.

The statement added that "the companies were doing their best" to repair the error as quickly as possible.

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