• Quote: ‘If the strike goes ahead, it will affect ALL of Spain’s airports as Enaire personnel are responsible for air traffic control’

By Andrew Atkinson

Two days of strike action has been mooted by unions CCOO, CSPA, UGT and USO involving employees of the state-run Enaire air navigation company and the workforce at the Región de Murcia International Airport.

The strike, scheduled for December 23 and 26, concerns pay agreements that came into force in 2019.

The unions say payments were not applied to Enaire personnel or the workforce in Murcia specifically.

Employees of the airports authority, Aena, received the pay they were due in 2020 – with the exception of those in Murcia.

Air traffic control

If the strike goes ahead, it will affect ALL of Spain’s airports and not only Murcia, as Enaire personnel are responsible for air traffic control.

The CCOO and the UGT have reportedly called an indefinite strike at easyJet and Menzies Aviation Ibérica every Friday and Saturday from December 17 for ‘violation of labour and union rights’ referring to lay-offs about which, the unions say, there was no dialogue.

The unions observed that Javier Gandara, CEO of easyJet in Spain and Portugal and the president of the Airlines Association in Spain, has ‘totally disappeared during the most serious crisis in the entire history of the sector’.

This leads them to believe that the attitude towards workforces and unions is not something specific but is a ‘very calculated’ trend.