Aer Lingus leaves 102 cabin crew stranded

OVER 100 cabin crew jobs are set to go from Shannon, under Aer Lingus’ cost-saving plans revealed last week. Senior Aer Lingus officials, including CEO Christoph Mueller, came to the Oakwood Arms last Thursday where they met with the airline’s Shannon-based employees.

While they are to engage in consultation before redundancies are implemented, management told staff they are to seek 102 redundancies from Shannon cabin crew, leaving around 35 still working from there.
Other staff are to see pay cuts and changes to their pension entitlements.
While there had been speculation that the airline’s Shannon-New York route would be scrapped, connectivity to JFK will continue.
However, from January 11 ,the route will go from four services a week to three and the service will originate in Dublin.
Speaking to The Clare Champion after last week’s meeting, Enda Corneille of Aer Lingus said that he wanted to see agreement reached with unions quickly. “Today, we continued the series of briefings on the critical issues. The company needs to save €97 million very quickly and we want to seek agreement with staff. Our plan is to reach agreement within six weeks.”
He said that the losses are largely coming from long haul and that this is where savings have to be made.
“We said that the Shannon-New York service will continue on a three-a-week basis for the foreseeable future. We made the point that unless we can agree on the saving of €97 million, the continuation of long haul, either in total or in part, is at risk. We need to make an urgent decision by the end of November on what shape or schedule there will be next year because if we can’t take the cost out, there is a very real chance that we simply won’t be able to operate long haul, regardless of whether it’s Shannon or Dublin.”
Mr Corneille said that the company had lost €93 million in the first half of 2009 and that a full-year loss of between €120 and €150 million is predicted. Around 70% of the loss is coming from long haul, he added.
The airline’s decision to pull its Heathrow slots from Shannon in 2007 was a PR disaster and Aer Lingus eventually restored connectivity to the London hub. Mr Corneille said there is no question of pulling slots again at the moment.
“Shannon-Heathrow continues to do reasonably well, it’s in line with the rest of our Heathrow operations and we are intending to increase the frequency to three a day with better timings,” he said.