The negotiations were tough. And the result is apparently not good: 80 percent of the members of the Aeropers pilots’ association have rejected the draft for a new collective labor agreement.
Swiss is struggling with the Aeropers pilots’ association for appropriate working conditions.
At Swiss, the house blessing is crooked: not only the cabin crew feels like a squeezed lemon. The atmosphere among the Swiss pilots is not the best either. The reason is the tough negotiations with the Swiss management about a new collective labor agreement (GAV). They were tough and tedious.
Draft already “outdated”?
A first draft, which had already been approved by the negotiators on both sides in February, was conceded a short time later by the Swiss management.
The negotiations continued. Finally, two weeks ago, a new draft was submitted to Aeropers members for comment and voting. And now this: 80.5 percent of Aeropers members reject the GAV. The clarity of the result surprised even Aeropers board member Roman Kälin: “It shows that parts of the GAV are already outdated by the current circumstances. The business environment has brightened significantly. The pilots want to be involved in this as before,” says Kälin of the NZZ. Participation in good business performance would have been worse in the 2022 CLA than in the 2018 CLA.
Swiss regrets the clear rejection and now wants to examine how to proceed, as she writes in a statement. The result was announced by Aeropers on Sunday after a two-week commenting and voting period for members.
«The negotiated GAV represented a compromise which, from our point of view, took the interests of Swiss and Aeropers into account in a balanced manner. With one assumption, the new GAV would have offered contractual stability for the next four years in a very volatile airline environment,” explains Oliver Buchhofer, Head of Operations and member of the extended Executive Board of Swiss.
Pilots are allowed to go on strike
Aeropers now wants to talk to the Swiss management again. But while Swiss does not initially expect that the rejection of the GAV could have an impact on flight operations, the Aeropers union sounds a little different. She writes in a statement: “The Aeropers Board of Directors is now calling for rapid improvements to the rejected contract in favor of the pilots, so that the stability of flight operations can be ensured over the summer and autumn.”
For the time being, the CLA-free status for the pilots, which has been in force since April 1, 2022, remains in place. This also means that the pilots are allowed to go on strike.