Collectively calling in sick: pilots' strike in Romania
Pilots at Bucharest Airport spontaneously staged a strike last Monday by calling in sick en masse. Around 10,000 passengers, mostly holiday travellers, were left stranded by the resulting flight cancellations. The strike was successful: Tarom promised the pilots a gradual pay increase totalling around 1,500 euros. The pilots had every reason to protest, says the national press.
Extreme protest owing to extreme conditions
The state-owned airline is lacking in every respect, Spotmedia observes:
“The Tarom pilots are resorting to an extreme protest because they themselves work under extreme conditions that are also dangerous for passengers. What is happening at Tarom is not just a moment of trade union pragmatism, but the consequence of many years during which the company has been fleeced, embezzled, stripped of its competences and stuffed with political clientele. Tarom has degenerated into a poorly paid company with little expertise, outdated aircraft, outdated practices and a base at an airport that was recently not even able to solve the trivial problem of a broken air conditioning system in the middle of summer.”
No company can function like this
The money at Tarom is not going where it's needed, columnist Stefan Vlaston laments in Adevărul:
“In recent years more than 500 pilots have left Tarom to work at other companies while only around 150 have stayed. And that's out of a total of 1,100 employees, most of whom are related to each other. And therein lies the problem. Other airlines have anywhere from 3,000 to 4,000 employees, ninety percent of whom are flight crew and ten percent support staff. At Tarom it's the other way round: ten percent are flight crew and ninety percent support staff. Because that's what the state owner, which places its political clientele in top jobs there, wants.”