The Icelandic airline Icelandair has announced to lay off all of its flight crew and temporary pilot for the on-Board service to use. This was the result of failed wage negotiations, reported the largest daily newspaper in the country, “Fréttablaðið”, on Friday. For weeks, the national airline negotiated with the domestic flight attendants-GewerkschaftFlugfreyjufélag Íslands (FFÍ) on new collective bargaining agreements for shipboard personnel.
An agreement seemed in sight: the end of June, both parties agreed on a new collective agreement with lower wages for flight attendants. However, the new Treaty failed in the ballot among the trade unionists. Only 24 percent of the FFÍ-members agreed with the result of collective bargaining – the majority, around 73 per cent, rejected the Treaty.
“This decision was hard,”
On Friday the Management of the stock exchange with shared listed on the Airline, finally, that the negotiations had failed. The hard consequence: Icelandair will dismiss all the employees in the company flight attendants. In a statement the airline said: “The goal was to ensure the long-term competitiveness of the company and to secure at the same time, remuneration and working conditions of the cabin crew.” A friendly solution was not, however, to find.
From Monday on, the pilots should take responsibility for the safety on Board the aircraft, and thus, temporarily, the service duties of the flight attendants perform. The services on Board are limited for this reason to a Minimum, as the Airline has announced. How long this transition phase will take was not immediately known. The managing Director of Icelandair, Bogi Nils Bogason, announced that the negotiations with another trade Union to continue.
