In the early hours of today, Monday, Palma airport recorded a total of seven delayed flights – three departures and four arrivals – on the first day of the ground staff strike, which is also affecting Ibiza airport, where no incidents have been reported, according to information from airport authority Aena.
The CCOO, UGT and USO unions have called an indefinite strike for Groundforce ground staff starting on Monday 30 March, which will take place in three different time slots and affect the 12 airports where the company operates, after postponing the strike by three days as it was originally due to begin this Friday.
The strike will therefore take place between 5.00 am and 7.00 am, between 11.00 am and 5.00 pm, and between 10.00 pm and midnight every day, for an indefinite period. The strike affects ground handling services at the airports of Barcelona, Madrid, Alicante, Valencia, Palma, Ibiza, Málaga, Las Palmas, Tenerife, Lanzarote, Fuerteventura and Bilbao.
The strike call is in response to “the company management’s failure to comply with the wage commitments set out in the collective agreement”, according to the unions, who point out that the company is unilaterally interpreting the articles of the agreement, which “in practice, is resulting in a direct loss of purchasing power”.
CCOO, for its part, claims that the company is using a restrictive interpretation of Article 96 of the agreement ‘to render null and void the provisions of Article 94, which guarantees wage adjustments in line with cumulative inflation since 2022’.
Furthermore, CCOO accuses management of having applied cuts to the agreed pay rises for certain professional groups, ‘which constitutes a direct breach of the current collective agreement and creates unjustified inequalities within the workforce itself’.