Airbus hissed the end of the crisis. Soon, the Covid-19 pandemic will be nothing more than a bad memory for the European aircraft manufacturer, which is projected at high speed into the next world. According to Christian Scherer, the group’s commercial director, the return to production rates known before the pandemic could even be much faster than expected. Sales boss anticipates return to better fortune “Between 2023 and 2025”.
The objective of the world number one in aeronautics is to get 45 A320 family aircraft per month out of its chains by the end of 2021. With a ramp-up that will accelerate, if not get carried away, to reach 64 copies per month by mid-2023, and 70 in 2024.
Very confident in the solidity of the recovery, the management of Airbus began to dream of rates reaching even 75 aircraft per month in 2025. Again “A simple hypothesis” for the aircraft manufacturer.
However, if optimism, even enthusiasm, is back in companies and manufacturers, it is not the same on the social front. It seems that the resumption of activity has not had a positive effect on the many social plans underway or in the pipeline. In the wake of Air France and Airbus, and their 7,500 and 5,000 (in France) respective job cuts, a large part of the aeronautics players have chosen to cut their workforce.
Myriad of subcontractors
“The plans continue to emerge. The departure procedures are not suspended ”, denounces Tayeb Khouira, member of the national office of SUD-Aérien.
From 20,000 to 30,000 job cuts are still pending among the myriad of sub-contractors of the Paris-Charles-de-Gaulle airport platform in Roissy-en-France. Clear cuts often coupled with “Rogue methods”, indignant the trade unionist. Thus, the Worldwide Flight Services (WFS) group, one of the largest sub-contractors of Roissy airport, is the only candidate for the takeover of… its subsidiary CBS, specializing in baggage handling, placed in compulsory liquidation.
“On the Orly platform, there are plenty of small companies which each saw a few dozen employees”, explains the CGT
A recovery with breakage: “174 job cuts out of 420 employees”, points out Mr. Khouira. But this is all to the benefit of WFS, which “Saves a PES [plan de sauvegarde de l’emploi] and who will not have to settle the debts of his ex-subsidiary ”, he adds.
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