Are we going to witness this summer, at Roissy and Orly, the same scenes of chaos as those which have just taken place at Amsterdam and London airports during the weekends of Ascension and Pentecost ? In recent months, airlines feared to witness traffic jams of passengers unable to access their planes on time, due to a lack of sufficient staff to enable them to complete airport formalities. At the height of summer, Roissy will welcome 120,000 passengers a day, after peaks at more than 100,000 in June.
In order not to have to “cut down”, that is to say, cancel flights, Air France has taken the lead. “We anticipated this situation by resuming pilot recruitment last year”, says the airline. To the 200 flight crew trained internally, Air France has recruited a hundred more externally. In addition to pilots, the company also has “hired 300 ground staff for its Paris stops at Roissy and Orly”.
Despite these precautions, the situation remains tense. It must be said that the two airport platforms have paid a heavy price for the crisis. In March 2021, the unions, mainly the CGT and SUD-Aérien, feared that up to 30,000 jobs would disappear out of the 94,000 on the Roissy platform. “With the end of fixed-term contracts, nearly 20,000 jobs have been eliminated at Roissy”notes Maximilien Dubois, study coordinator for Paris CDG Alliance, a public interest group whose mission is “to ensure that the inhabitants of the territory have access to the jobs generated by the activity of the airport”.
An “attractiveness problem”
Since then, despite the resumption of activity, the airport is far from having regained its 2019 level of employment, recalls Mr. Dubois. “At the end of 2021, there were only 82,000 left working at Roissy. » It was Augustin de Romanet, CEO of Groupe ADP, who sounded the alarm, en pushing a “rant”, on April 24, on the antenna of BFM, to mobilize all the actors. According to the boss of the airport group, 4,000 jobs are to be filled at Roissy and Orly. For its part, ADP must recruit 600 people to be ready for the big departures on vacation. A few weeks before this deadline, M. de Romanet does not admit “not worried”. Since January 1, the airport manager has already succeeded “to hire 270 employees”, he says. According to him, ADP will however not be able to recruit “the 600 employees for this summer, but at the beginning of 2023”.
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