Flight attendants at Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) had to go on strike for them, but have now won many of the standard pay and benefits held by other workers. That prompted them to call off the strike they’d called last week, and disrupted SAS flights could start running again Tuesday morning.
“We are now both satisfied and relieved,” said Jørn Eggum, leader of Norway’s large trade union federation Fellesforbundet. “It’s never easy when you land in a conflict.” He said the flight attendants won all three demands they’d made when they went on strike last week: Better pay, at least two free weekends a month and lunch breaks on the ground.
SAS has been emerging from bankruptcy protection, leaving its flight attendants with wages of less than NOK 500,000 (USD 50,000) a year. That’s hard to live on in Norway, where the average wage is more than USD 650,000. They also had to work long days and rarely had more than two days off in a row. Meal breaks often had to be taken standing up in the rear of an aircraft.
After years of unrest and an apparent lack of understanding from management executives, many of whom retained multi-million-kroner salaries, they claimed “enough was enough.” The strike that began last last week quickly led to cancelled flights within Norway, and the strike was due to spread from Wednesday.
State mediator Mats Ruland called both sides in for more talks on Monday. A standard meeting on the status of the situation led to more negotiations Monday night, resulting early Tuesday morning in what Eggum called “an historic day” for the flight attendants who claimed they hadn’t had a pay raise for 12 years.
Their leader, Martinus Røkkum of the SAS Norge kabinforening in labour federation Parat, claims the SAS flight attendants will still have salaries that he thinks are too low. “Given the starting point from their employer, though, who claimed that SAS still needs to save money and that we should give up demands for higher pay, we are satisfied with the settlement,” Røkkum wrote in a press statement.
Airline management also seemed relieved. NHO Luftfart, the employers’ organization that bargained on behalf of SAS, reported that it was glad the strike was over. Its leader Erik Lahnstein wouldn’t release “concrete numbers” yet, but told state broadcaster NRK Tuesday morning that flight attendants would now get “a decent pay raise, more weekends off” and that SAS would “make other changes” to meet “important demands” from its employees.
More than 30 flights between Norway’s largest airports were cancelled as of Tuesday morning. It remained unclear when traffic could resume as scheduled, but that was expected by Wednesday.
SAS continues to face serious economic challenges, made worse by closed air space over Russia (which hurts the long-distance market), a need for higher ticket prices and after-effects of the pandemic. Norway remains an attractive market, however, and SAS new partners include KLM and Air France.
NewsinEnglish.no/Nina Berglund
