Confédération Générale du Travail
CGT
Centrale syndicale Nationale de défense des droits et intérêts des salariés.
ID: 387404740026-78
Lobbying Activity
Response to Social and labour aspects of the climate transition
19 Nov 2021
We will support a EU Green Deal that truly takes into consideration and acts on the social and labor aspects of a fair transition.
As a labor union representing workers in all sectors of aviation from ground to cabin and flight crews, we have been in opposition to what seems to have been the main objective in the EU in the past years, that being a reduction in airline fares. Under the objective of connectivity, a race to lower prices was encouraged by the EU as well as a distortion of the EU aviation market.
This race has had the direct social consequence of lowering the quality of work conditions and pay. A race to the bottom that has had direct consequences such as union-busting, forbidding of unions in certain companies, and the introduction to a much greater level of atypical forms of employment that have direct social consequences for the people under those forms. Tax evasion and forum shopping for the lowest level of labor conditions is becoming much more widespread amongst european based airlines.
The current development of EU aviation has been almost exclusively driven by so called low cost/low fare airlines which have altered the social environment in which aviation was before their arrival.
We urge the EU to consider social and labor aspects of aviations by truly leveling the playing field.
This requires:
• harmonize social and labor conditions amongst the EU.
• to absolutely forbid circumvention strategies of labor and fiscal laws
• to reassess the regulation defining home bases for crews
• stopping fake self employment statuses for crews
• truly have the ELA enforce the laws and regulations and give them a real oversight capacity both legally and practically with sufficient numbers of inspectors.
Truly protecting social conditions of workers will stop the race to the bottom that has also brought a wide expansion of flights with little positive benefits for both aviation workers and local tourism industries.
An environmental transition must take into account social conditions.
Interconnectivity must be encouraged and if the EU was to reduce or cap flights resulting in loss of jobs, it is abaolutely necessary that a fund be put in place to transition workers into new jobs and maintain their social conditions.
It is also not acceptable for the EU to encourage a transfer of quality jobs in aviation to lower quality aviation jobs under pretenses of connectivity of environmental concerns. The EU must fund adequately the transition to maintain social conditions for the workers that would be affected.
It is also absolutely unconceivable that labor unions and workers representatives not be included in all steps of the Green Deal for aviation. As well as the ELA. No social or labor issues will be holistically dealt with without these representatives
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