Jobs set to be lost at airport
51 FRONTLINE POSTS AT RISK, PARENT GROUP SAYS
DOZENS of jobs could go at East Midlands Airport as it counts the cost of a 90 per cent drop in passenger numbers.
The airport said it is considering cutting 51 roles in frontline services, warning there was no sign of business picking up any time soon.
It is part of wide-ranging redundancies announced by the airport’s parent group, which could see 465 jobs go at Manchester Airport and 376 roles cut at London Stansted. A total of 892 jobs are at risk. Manchester Airports Group (MAG), which operates all three airports, said the latest spike in the virus, combined with an “absence of dedicated support for the aviation sector” and a lack of testing for UK passengers, had undermined passenger confidence in air travel for the next year.
It also warned of “adjustments” to roles, roster patterns and “other employment measures”.
Between April and August, 2.8 million passengers travelled through its three airports – compared with 30.3 million in the same period last year.
Overall passenger demand, it said, was not expected to recover before 2023/24.
The decline in passengers has already led to job losses among firms with operations at the airport, such as baggage handling giant Swissport and Jet 2.
Unite, the main aviation union, blamed the job losses on the government’s failure to provide support to the sector.
Group chief executive Charlie Cornish said: “By now, we would have hoped to see a strong and sustained recovery in demand.
“Unfortunately, the resurgence of the virus across Europe and the reintroduction of travel restrictions have meant this has not happened.
“With uncertainty about when a vaccine will be widely available, we need to be realistic about when demand is likely to recover.
“The end of the Job Retention Scheme means we have to consider the number of roles that we can sustain at our airports.
“We will be discussing these issues with our trade unions, and consulting them fully on a range of options for reducing the size and overall cost of our workforce.
“We want to work with them to make sure we minimise the impact on our people as much as we can.
“I want to thank everyone across MAG for the dedication they have shown through the toughest summer our industry has ever seen.
“MAG and other UK airports remain fundamentally strong businesses that will play an important role in driving the country’s recovery, but the specific and short-term pressures of the pandemic are exceptional and particularly challenging for our sector.
“We will continue to work to protect as many jobs as possible.”
Lawrence Chapple-Gill, Unite regional co-ordinating officer, said: “This announcement will come as a bitter blow to the hard-working staff at Manchester Airport.
“They and their families now face a very difficult and unsettling time but Unite will support them every step of the way.
“Unite will do everything it can to reduce job losses and seek to ensure any eventual redundancies are voluntary and not compulsory.
“These job losses are an inevitable consequence of the government’s failure to provide sector-specific support to the aviation industry, the sector which has been most heavily affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.”
He said confidence in the industry would return once Covid-19 was under control, and said: “It is a total failure of government to not be assisting the industry and its workforce through this crisis in order to ensure it can quickly recover when the virus abates.”