It is a very busy day at the airport on Saturday due to the start of the May holiday. Dozens of flights from KLM and KLM partners have been cancelled. The lines extend outside the airport.

There is a good chance that flights will leave without baggage due to the wild cat strike. The national airport is expecting half a million passengers in the coming days and anticipates waiting times of up to an hour and a quarter. A Schiphol spokesperson said Saturday morning that travelers should take flight delays and cancellations into account.

“Do not load and unload hands”

“Customers are being informed and we look forward to more impact,” said a spokesperson for the airline, which is the largest user of Schiphol.

The plane cannot depart from Schiphol or anywhere else to the Netherlands, because there are no hands to unload and load the plane. As a result, the entire network is in shambles, with flights delayed and canceled. “We will be speaking with ground operation personnel,” the spokeswoman said.

emotions

It is unclear who will speak to the angry baggage handlers. They want Operations Director Rene de Groot to come to the airport to talk to them. “There is no other way,” he stated in a letter to staff on Thursday.

We understand that the decision may raise feelings and questions. After all, we are enlisting the help of a competitor.” According to de Groot, this would be a “last resort”, because other steps did not produce results, the letter states. KLM’s ground operation has been troublesome for years, which incidentally pays its employees better than The other players are at the airport.

Bag workers are irritated that KLM wants to outsource some of the ground work to Viggo, another handling company. This could be due to the current staff shortage.

Cheaper

KLM subsidiary Transavia has already switched to Viggo’s services during the Corona crisis, because it also operates at a lower cost. KLM employees fear they will want to change business under the guise of the crisis, according to a spokesperson.

According to FNV, they did not take part in the protest, but campaign leader Joost van Doesburg says they are ready to mediate. In total, there are 150 strikers, according to FNV. At six o’clock they stopped working. “This unbridled strike is the result of poor working conditions for the land employees,” says Van Doesburg. “If KLM wants to solve the problem of staff shortages, it should improve working conditions, rather than outsourcing plans.”

Platform workers strike in Schiphol on Saturday morning.

FNV

Internal reports suggest that KLM should move to Viggo because otherwise it would lose the cracks and the take-off and landing moment. These are essential in maintaining the flights, which are essential to the survival of the company.

lack of jobs

Operation at Schiphol will be under pressure on Saturday anyway, because only one runway and one runway are in use due to Buitenfeldert runway maintenance and wind direction. Usually there are three or four at ‘rush hour’.

During a briefing for all of the handling companies on Friday, there really seemed to be many gaps in the schedule, because there weren’t enough temporary workers available. KLM has already canceled flights for Saturday because the airport cannot accommodate them, but said on Friday that its schedules are still reasonable through Saturday.

In a letter to KLM management, outraged platform employees wrote Thursday that the current job market “simply requires a different approach. Hiring employees who have been offered a permanent contract after a successful trial period is a simple example that provides a point of view.”