As many as one in four flights of the Scandinavian airline SAS will not take off from Norwegian airports on Friday due to a cabin crew strike. The carrier has not accepted the employees' wage demands.
SAS cabin crew have given the airline's management until Thursday night to accept their pay demands. Representatives of the trade unions associated at the Fellesforbundet headquarters have been pointing out for weeks that the pay of cabin crew at SAS has not changed for 12 years and is lower than that of competitors by up to 30 percent.
Scandinavian Airlines System is the largest carrier in Northern Europe.sas plane airport shutterstock_1306255522.jpg
Talks without agreement
As Fellesforbundet chief Dag-Einar Sivertsen said in a statement sent to the media, in addition to the pay rise, employees are demanding two weekends off per month and a daily breakfast break “in appropriate conditions”.
Negotiations at the national mediation centre with the participation of employee representatives, the airline and the employers' association NHO failed to produce an agreement.
“The situation is getting even more difficult”
“We knew the negotiations would be difficult. The fact that SAS is in bankruptcy protection and is undergoing financial restructuring at the same time meant that we were entering the mediation from a difficult position. The current conflict makes SAS's situation even more difficult,” said Erik Lahnstein of the NHO before the last negotiation meeting.
Without cabin crew, a passenger plane cannot fly. – The task of the cabin crew is also to ensure the safety of passengers. Stewardesses and stewards are trained to provide first aidand above all, to carry out an effective and safe evacuation within 90 seconds – Willy Bergsnov from Fellesforbundet emphasized in an interview with PAP.
640 cabin crew employees of the Norwegian part of SAS have declared their participation in the strike. On Thursday, 115 of them received information from the unions that if a compromise is not reached by midnight, they should not report to work on Friday.
Scandinavian Airlines System
Scandinavian Airlines System, a Danish-Norwegian-Swedish company, is the largest carrier in Northern Europe. Although 23.7 million passengers used SAS in 2023, the company ended the year with a loss of over 5.5 billion Swedish kronor (over 2 billion PLN). In Poland, its planes serve connections to Gdańsk, Poznań and Warsaw.