The Ministry of Finance (Gestha) has warned that passenger control at Palma’s Son San Joan airport is at risk of collapse due to successive medical leaves of absence caused by the deterioration in working conditions over the past few months.
According to the ministry passenger service at Palma Airport Customs lies in the hands of only five technicians who must provide the service 24 hours a day, every day of the year.
Four of the five are already off sick “due to the decision to change the traditional six-monthly timetables and work shifts for monthly ones in which shifts are multiplied by reducing their duration, and every month they are changed, with staff being informed just a week before”.
According to Gestha, these changes are ‘unpredictable because they have been adopted without justification, ‘harmful’ because they prevent work-life balance and increase the number of journeys to the airport, and ‘toxic’ because 80 % of the technicians are suffering from burn-out.
Gestha has warned that the AEAT Delegation in the Balearics admits that, with the new monthly schedules, there are days in which no passenger control is carried out at the airport, through which more than 30 million people have passed between January and November this year.
The secretary general of Gestha, José María Mollinedo, is asking AEAT to “investigate the situation of the workers in accordance with Procedure PRO-SAL 1300 for the investigation of work-related accidents and occupational illnesses, in order to determine the causes that have triggered and generated the damage to their health”.
It demands that it “adopt corrective measures to eliminate them, as well as to care for and protect the affected workers and facilitate their recovery, in accordance with the Law on the Prevention of Occupational Risks”.