No passenger flights will take off from Berlin Airport this Monday due to a warning strike. Some of the arrivals of planes are also affected and are cancelled. The Verdi union called on employees in the aviation security area, in passenger control and in personnel and goods control to stop working from 3.30 a.m. to midnight. The airport then announced that no passenger flight could take off.
Almost all of the approximately 240 originally planned departures were already canceled on the airport’s website on Sunday. Some of the approximately 240 planned arrivals of aircraft, such as Ryanair, KLM and Air France, were also said to be “cancelled”.
According to the airport, the respective airline decides whether planes will arrive. Passengers should check with the airlines. The airport assumes that some of the landings will be canceled because the planes can no longer take off with new passengers and continue flying after their arrival.
BER just one of many
The warning strike at the capital’s airport joins a long list of work stoppages, especially in traffic, in recent weeks. Only on Thursday and Friday were there warning strikes at the airports in Düsseldorf, Cologne/Bonn and Hamburg, and on Friday also at the airports in Stuttgart and Karlsruhe/Baden-Baden. The warning strikes led to numerous flight cancellations, affecting tens of thousands of people. There was still a strike at Baden Airport on Saturday.
In Hamburg, flight operations ran at full speed over the weekend. Especially on Saturday there were still after-effects of the strike with overcrowded terminals and full flights. Many holiday returnees at the end of the Easter holidays in Schleswig-Holstein had rebooked their canceled flights to Saturday. Sunday was pretty much normal.
Rail traffic also stood still for hours on Friday morning because the collective bargaining between the railway and transport union EVG and 50 railway companies is stalling. The union had called for a walkout for eight hours to increase the pressure on employers before the next negotiations.
The next talks between the EVG and Deutsche Bahn are scheduled for Tuesday – but a solution to the wage conflict is considered extremely unlikely. The EVG has already threatened that there could be further warning strikes.
Conversations have been going on for a long time
The reason for the airport warning strikes on Thursday, Friday and Monday are negotiations on surcharges for night, Saturday, Sunday and public holiday work and regulations on overtime pay for security and service staff. Talks have been going on between Verdi and the Federal Association of Aviation Security Companies (BDLS) for some time.
“We once again urge the BDLS to submit a negotiable offer on April 27th and 28th and not to play for time, otherwise there is a risk of further strikes in air traffic in May and at Pentecost,” said Wolfgang Pieper from the Verdi trade union saturday with
The airport association ADV appealed to the collective bargaining partners to seek an agreement at the negotiating table. “An all-day strike that isolates the capital’s airport from international air traffic has long since had nothing to do with a warning strike,” the association said in a statement. Because of the short-notice announcement, the passengers affected hardly had a chance to “look for alternative travel options”.
… and the third
It is the third major warning strike this year at Berlin Airport. As early as March 13, a work stoppage prevented all departures, the reason being the negotiations about surcharges for security personnel. During a warning strike on January 25, Verdi stopped all commercial air traffic. At that time, employees of the airport company and the ground handling services went down with the security personnel. In the meantime, collective agreements have been concluded for these two groups.
At the airports in Düsseldorf and Cologne/Bonn, operations were almost normal again on Saturday after the two days of warning strikes. The online portals of both airports showed largely normal operations for departures and arrivals on Saturday morning. In Cologne/Bonn, however, 38 of a total of 198 passenger flights planned for this Saturday had been canceled or diverted as a result of the warning strike.
Rail traffic ran smoothly again. Traffic has also been resumed in an orderly manner in freight traffic, but it usually takes a little longer there for the backlog to be completely resolved, said a DB spokeswoman.
